How Tempo made Mazda’s workflows much easier to manage

Background

Mazda Australia is a subsidiary of Mazda Motor Company, and has delivered Mazda products to Australians for over 50 years. Their head office is in Notting Hill, Victoria, with offices in most mainland states of Australia and an extensive nationwide network of dealerships.

We caught up with John Twomey, senior manager of systems development at Mazda Australia, to find out more about his team’s usage of Timesheets by Tempo and Tempo Capacity Planner.

Having used Timesheets since 2012, predominantly for new product development and IT purposes, and Tempo Capacity Planner since 2014 for resource allocation planning, Twomey was kind enough to share his experience with us of how these two tools and made his teams workflows and reporting that much more efficient and effective.

Not enough time?

One of the challenges Mazda Australia faced before implementing Timesheets was limited time reporting. They were using an alternative worklog solution, which wasn't sufficiently enabling them to report on this work easily enough. Their long-term plans were to also support timesheet approvals for contractors and track work across the various departments within their organisation.

Before Twomey and his team implemented Capacity Planner they were relying on Excel spreadsheets. Mazda wanted an automated tool, to have better visibility for allocation of resources and project planning, and be capable of linking that to actual work.

How Timesheets and Capacity Planner helped

We asked Twomey about how Tempo Timesheets solves the challenges Mazda was facing. He said that Tempo Timesheets allows Mazda to log work against Jira issues that are associated to customers and accounts. This provides a mechanism to report the amount of effort IT personnel have attributed to different departments.

Before implementing Timesheets, Mazda checked paper timesheets against actuals in Jira manually, which proved to be a clunky process – and one that can run the risk of human error entering the process. However, now they are using Timesheets, the process has been automated and this has ensured more accuracy in logged work.

Additionally, Mazda plans resource allocation at a high level and found that Tempo Capacity Planner was the ideal tool to help assist with team reporting and resource planning to senior management.

Twomey said: “By using the combination of Tempo Capacity Planner and Timesheets, it enables us to link the planned work to work logged, to better understand the utilization of resources and improve our project estimation.”

The results

Twomey mentioned a few benefits he and his organization have experienced while using Tempo Timesheets, including the ease of logging work and accuracy in reporting functionality. Their overall team efficiency has increased, along with cost savings since implementing Tempo Timesheets:

“Tempo Timesheets has made the process of logging work much easier, so it has encouraged users to log work more frequently, and accurately and it is no longer as much of a chore,” says Twomey, “[We’ve experienced] reduced double handling during timesheet approvals for contractors, where paper-based forms were required before we implemented the automated integration with external parties.”

When asked whether Mazda had experienced an increase in customer satisfaction thanks to Timesheets by Tempo, he indicated that his departments have improved visibility of work attributed to their departments.

The end result is better accuracy, efficiency, and transparency of organizational work efforts, powered by Jira and Tempo, and an end-to-end solution that Twomey would recommend to others.