Supernova Award Category

Future of Work: Human Capital Management

The Problem

PayPal’s Office of the CIO is responsible for a complex portfolio of projects involving more than 100 day-to-day players. One requirement is to deliver up-to-date, accurate, and dependable information for a weekly C-suite check-in meeting, where critical business decisions are made. Due to the lack of automation, team members were manually creating net-new content each week instead of updating existing activities. This inefficient, inconsistent, and time-consuming process lacked the flexibility to efficiently deliver data needed to ensure informed decision-making, forcing the organization to hire two consultants to primarily collect data. Challenges included:

• No real-time visibility into projects and inconsistency of data
• Loss of productivity, additional costs and time due to manual entry and reporting
• Muddled collaboration across stakeholders
• Compromised data and decision-making
• Misaligned goals and outcomes
• Frustrating and unproductive work environment.

The Solution

The team recognized the critical need to improve the collection and reporting of data to ensure accuracy and reliability for executives to make informed decisions. The solution needed to deliver significant capabilities—automation, consistency, and flexibility for all participants—while generating dependable executive dashboarding and reporting. There also was an urgency to start quickly to enable many teams to seamlessly collaborate on the same data. As the world’s leading SaaS platform for managing and automating collaborative work, Smartsheet met these challenging requirements while supporting varied user workstyles, processes, and methodologies. As a Smartsheet customer since 2013, PayPal had used the powerful work platform to support a range of business needs —from security and risk management to talent acquisition. And now C-suite reporting via dashboards supports informed business decisions that fundamentally affect PayPal’s performance. 

The results

The Smartsheet-powered weekly C-suite reporting is enabling PayPal executives to have greater confidence in the data and make more informed strategic decisions. The Office of the CIO team can add meaningful content to this single point of truth and no longer needs two consultants, reducing costs while delivering accurate, high-quality weekly reporting. Initial results include:

• Easily, effectively, accurately, and quickly automating weekly data collection and executive reporting.
• Assurance that the outcome consistently reflects the latest and greatest data
• Weekly time savings of 80 hours in consultant resources to manually collect data.
• The flexibility to meet many different types of user workstyles, processes, and methodologies.
• A significant reduction in time and increased productivity across internal teams.
• A more efficient, positive, and satisfying work environment.

With a commitment to continuous improvement, the team further enhanced data and reporting accuracy, automation, and productivity by deploying Smartsheet for Salesforce, which integrates key background data directly into the C-suite dashboard.

Metrics

PayPal executives have greater confidence in the accuracy, reliability, and consistency of data, affording more informed decision-making that positively impacts business performance and success. While the Office of the CIO team is still quantifying metrics, results include:

• Improved collection and reporting of weekly C-suite data.
• Achieved greater data accuracy, reliability, and consistency.  
• A transformation in C-suite decision-making, which has a material effect on PayPal’s business.
• Eliminated two consultants and 80 hours of weekly, manual data-collection time at an estimated cost of $388,000 per year.
• Generated significant internal time-savings and productivity improvements.
• Increased the Smartsheet return on investment by using the tool for more applications and higher value requirements.  
• Established Smartsheet as the fundamental, consistent, and reliable foundation for data-driven processes.
• Further enhanced weekly executive reporting with Smartsheet Control Center and Smartsheet for Salesforce.
• Found great value and productivity from a flexible and powerful tool that addresses a complex portfolio of projects involving 100-plus day-to-day players, who have different workstyles, processes, and methodologies.
• Enhanced employee satisfaction, productivity, collaboration, and the overall work environment.

The Technology

Smartsheet, which provides users broadly applicable solutions, rich application integrations (Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, etc.), continuous data visibility, and the power of scale. These robust capabilities enable real-time collaboration that streamlines communication, empowers teams, and drives efficiencies while delivering automation, accurate reporting and dashboards, and ease of use for varied levels of users. Deployments include Smartsheet Control Center and Smartsheet for Salesforce.

Disruptive Factor

PayPal is a company driven by innovation that seeks to disrupt the financial industry by democratizing services and empowering people and businesses to join and thrive in the global economy. PayPal’s ability to disrupt financial norms requires thoughtfulness on engaging customers and using cutting-edge solutions for critical internal operations. The company’s way forward is to embrace cloud-based tools that automate collaborative work, deliver greater accuracy, flexibility, and productivity, and meet the needs of a variety of user workstyles, processes, and methodologies.

Out-of-date systems that impede employee progress, innovation, and sharing are being eliminated since PayPal has found it impossible to disrupt and change the customer experience when its leadership and workforce are constrained by inaccurate data, manual tasks, and inflexible tools. By implementing Smartsheet, the Office of the CIO team has a secure, accessible, and easy-to-use platform for collecting and collaborating on weekly data reporting, and C-suite executives can rely on the accuracy, reliability, and consistency of the data to uncover insights, make informed business decisions, and further disrupt the financial services industry. By leveraging secure, cloud-based tools like Smartsheet, PayPal is enabling teams to better work together, save time that can be used to innovate in other areas, become more productive, and continuously improve and do their best work.

Shining Moment

Since implementing Smartsheet, the Office of the CIO team is regularly contacted by colleagues in other organizations to discuss data collection, reporting, and solutions. These conversations provide an opportunity to learn from each other, share best practices, understand what different teams are accomplishing, and break down internal silos across the company. This internal collaboration is opening many new and exciting possibilities for innovation, reflecting the drive and spirit of PayPal!