How Synergist helps Uniform Group make sharper decisions

The problem

Systems that couldn't keep up

“The business has been going 25 years, and we've used quite a number of different systems as we got bigger and needed to digitise ourselves more,” Michelle says.

“What worked for you when you were 30 people doesn't work for you when you're 50 or 70 people,” she says. As the group scaled, “the reporting became even more important to us, and that ability to really drill down into the data was needed.”

“We want to be able to look at the data and know that it's absolutely accurate, and that we don't have to massage it to get the view we want to see.”

“The system we were using previously didn't give us the sort of robust reporting we knew Synergist could give us. That was really the big deal breaker for making us want to move to Synergist.”

The solution

One system, shaped to fit

Uniform moved from several disconnected systems to Synergist, a single, end-to-end platform, in 2020. “Everything's joined up: CRM all the way through to invoicing and the finance side, and everything in between,” Michelle says. Synergist's integration with Xero, brought in around the same time, keeps invoicing and accounting data flowing together too.

“All the systems we'd used before were very, very rigid.” Synergist is highly customisable, letting the team shape it to their own way of working rather than the other way round. “Rather than having to adapt your workflow to it, it's adaptable, it helps us mould together,” Michelle says. “It wasn't that we didn't want to fit our business to the system, we wanted our system to fit to our business.”

Custom fields let the team capture exactly the data they need, and Synergist's data analytics tools let them slice and dice it into bespoke reports of their own, embedded into daily workflows. “That's the power of back-end reporting like this,” Michelle says. “With all the systems we've used in the past, we've just not had that ability to create that level of report.”

“You get much more personal service using a system that's UK-based. The help desk are very responsive and resolve issues quickly.” Over the years, the team has also had the ability to influence Synergist's roadmap. “I feel like we've been listened to, and things have been implemented to help it work best for us,” Michelle says. “We want to work with a system and people who understand our business, the agency world and the creative industry in general. That's the added value you get from Synergist.”

The return

Sharper decisions, real results

“We're now able to see the real-time reports directly in Synergist, rather than pull data out of a system and have to massage it into a Google sheet,” Michelle says. “It helps us have much more of an overarching view, in a much speedier way.” That includes new business pipeline, utilisation, capacity forecasting and recovery. “That utilisation forecast piece has been really good at helping us manage the peaks and troughs,” she says. “We look at a close view, so maybe four to six weeks ahead, but we also look at a longer term, three to six months.”

“Historically, we'd look at the efficiency of a project at the end. That's historic data, you can't really do anything about it,” Michelle says. The team built a bespoke job efficiency report, giving them live visibility into how a job is performing while it's still running, rather than only once it closes. “This report allows us to mitigate that and take steps to reverse that course, which we couldn't do previously. That's been a real game changer for us. We've been able to go back to clients to ask for more time, so there's definitely an impact on profitability there.”

“Synergist listens to what customers want and helps us create the reporting infrastructure that helps us make good operating decisions to help our business run more smoothly, protect our profitability and move the needle for us.”