agradblue

Situation

agradblue is a sustainability consulting firm specializing in ESG services for the real estate sector. With a team of approximately 85 employees spread across three national and international locations, agradblue manages projects that range in duration from just a few weeks to several years. The company primarily works on fixed-price projects, but they also handle projects based on hourly rates and various compensation models tied to specific performance benchmarks. With projects varying significantly in complexity and duration, efficient planning and real-time monitoring are critical for their success.

Challenge

Before implementing CoffeeCup, agradblue encountered several operational challenges. The lack of a cohesive resource planning system made it difficult to manage the availability and allocation of employees effectively. “We had no real transparency in our resource planning. It was not possible to analyze based on data how many full-time employees with certain skills were available at a certain project period.’ - Michael Schremmer, Head of Sustainability. “Our capacity planning was not detailed enough and there was no effective system in place to match staff skills to specific project requirements. This made it difficult to allocate the right resources to projects and anticipate staffing needs.

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In addition, PMs had little visibility into the budget status of ongoing projects: “Our team members could not regularly check how much of the remaining fixed price budget was still available for further work on their respective projects without additional effort. It was therefore not 100% transparent and it took some effort to regularly determine whether the budget had already been exceeded,” said Michael. This lack of clarity created delays in decision-making and preventing timely project adjustments.

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The billing process was also a weak point. Michael noted: “Our billing was in the hands of one person who did everything manually with Excel and Word and then implemented it in a higher-level system. It was a process that took up a lot of resources and time. We wanted to move to a system that would support the billing process in a fully digital and integrated way and involve the project manager in the billing planning.”

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Impact

The introduction of CoffeeCup dramatically improved agradblue’s project controlling and resource planning. “With CoffeeCup, we now have far more detailed resource planning. We can tag each employee with specific skills, so when new projects come in, we can quickly see how many available resources the required qualifications have,” said Michael. This granular level of planning allowed agradblue to allocate resources more efficiently and ensure that projects had the right personnel assigned to them.

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Project controlling has also been significantly improved. ‘We can now track project budgets in real time without any additional effort. If a project is in danger of going over budget, we can react more quickly. This transparency is a major benefit for everyone involved,” Michael explained. The system also allowed employees to monitor their billable hours and ensured that projects stayed within planned timelines and budgets.

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Michael emphasized the cultural shift that occurred with CoffeeCup: “We’ve integrated the system into our performance targets, which motivates employees to log their time more accurately and promptly. The real-time tracking has been embraced by everyone because they understand the value of having up-to-date information.”

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Migration Process

The transition to CoffeeCup was remarkably smooth, even with a tight deadline. “We had about four or five months from deciding to implement CoffeeCup to going live, and the whole process, including migrating data from our old system, went incredibly well,” said Michael. agradblue started the pilot in October and officially went live on January 1. Michael added, “The onboarding was seamless, and the support from CoffeeCup was outstanding. Many didn’t believe we could go live by January 1, but we did it—thanks to the great collaboration with CoffeeCup’s team.”

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