The Engineering department at IDEX Health & Science was spending a lot of time gathering data and only getting a fraction of the data they needed for the effort. AtTask made data gathering automatic, increased their work capacity, and gave them the intelligence to streamline their processes.

1. ENABLING BETTER
PROCESSES
How IDEX Health & Science Increased Its Project Capacity By 367%

2. IDEX Health & Science, LLC
• Industry: Medical Device
• Department: Engineering, Sales, Supply
Chain, Quality
• Location: Oak Harbor, WA; Rohnert Park. CA;
Middleboro, MA; Bristol, CT
• Employees: 550
• Designs, develops, and manufactures 9 product
lines of fluidic subsystems
CUSTOMER BACKGROUND

3. In early 2008, the IDEX engineering team was
tracking their projects in a homegrown tool, shared
folders, and email. For an excessive amount of
manual work, they got only a fraction of the visibility
they needed.
BREAKING POINT

4. To track down project updates and keep
spreadsheets updated, engineers had to spend up
to 15% of their time chasing down
stakeholders, sitting in meetings, and digging
through emails, instead of on their primary
engineering tasks.
BREAKING POINT

5. Despite so much effort, their tool was incapable of
delivering even basic visibility. They couldn’t view
projects at the portfolio level. Projects were removed
accidentally from the spreadsheet or just forgotten.
BREAKING POINT

6. The tool consumed half of their time for
administration and support until finally, the
spreadsheet became so complex that it began to
crash regularly.
BREAKING POINT

7. The IDEX engineering team knew they needed to
find a professional solution.
BREAKING POINT

8. ―The complexity of what we were trying to do just started sucking
up so many resources to administer. Half of our time was spent
administering and supporting our home-built tool. That was the
final straw for us.‖
–Kurt Pickle, Vice-President of Engineering
BREAKING POINT

9. BEYOND PROJECT MANAGEMENT
As they began looking at project management
tools, Microsoft Project Server didn’t have the
flexibility or user-friendliness they were looking for
and would take extensive training.

10. BEYOND PROJECT MANAGEMENT
Basecamp, on the other hand, was too basic for the
team’s needs.

11. BEYOND PROJECT MANAGEMENT
A demo from an AtTask sales rep finally caught their
attention.

12. BEYOND PROJECT MANAGEMENT
AtTask would give them the ability to customize the
solution to their various activities, beyond just project
management.

13. BEYOND PROJECT MANAGEMENT
AtTask was intuitive enough that the team would
adopt it quickly, but robust enough for the level of
data-collection and reporting they hoped to achieve.

14. BEYOND PROJECT MANAGEMENT
In May 2008, the IDEX engineering team signed on
with AtTask.

15. ―AtTask gave us the ability to do a lot of different activities within
it. You could use the functionality for more than just purely project
management stuff. It was flexible, and we could adapt it to work
for us, rather than trying to conform our business to it.‖
–Scott Ellis, Director of Engineering, IDEX Health & Science
BEYOND PROJECT MANAGEMENT

16. Initially rolled out with only the engineering
team, AtTask began generating the visibility they’d
been seeking.
ENABLING PROCESS IMPROVEMENT

17. The team’s managers suddenly had a real-time view
into every project and their entire portfolio—how
many engineers were on each project, what each
team member was working on, completion time for
each project.
ENABLING PROCESS IMPROVEMENT

18. By monitoring key points in the product development
process in AtTask, they could spot bottlenecks and
make data-driven decisions to streamline processes.
ENABLING PROCESS IMPROVEMENT

19. Instead of spending time maintaining spreadsheets
and chasing updates, the engineering team’s reports
were suddenly automated. AtTask also allowed
them to increase stakeholder input and hold team
members accountable.
ENABLING PROCESS IMPROVEMENT

20. The IDEX team was able to work faster than ever
before. The need for meetings decreased.
Turnaround time on customer quotes shrank from 14
days to five.
ENABLING PROCESS IMPROVEMENT

21. As AtTask enabled the team to become more
mature, their annual project capacity grew from six
projects to 28.
ENABLING PROCESS IMPROVEMENT

22. As the success of AtTask grew, so did the team’s
license count. Soon, the Supply
Chain, Quality, Engineering, and Sales departments
were also using AtTask.
ENABLING PROCESS IMPROVEMENT

23. ―Before AtTask, we were getting out about six projects a year.
We’ve had two years in a row now with 28 projects completed.
AtTask has been a great, big part of that. It’s been a huge enabler
in improving our processes.‖
–Scott Eliis, Director of Engineering
ENABLING PROCESS IMPROVEMENT

24. Summary
ENABLING PROCESS IMPROVEMENT
Customer
quote
turnaround
dropped from
14 to 5 days.
Annual project
capacity grew
by 367%.
AtTask spread
from
Engineering
into six other
departments.