5 Reasons to Consolidate Your Business Tools and Save With OppBoard

Does it feel like the number of tools in your tech stack keeps growing, but actual work is getting harder to complete?

It’s more common than you think—the 2020 Blissfully SaaS Trends Report found enterprise companies use an average of 288 different business apps in the entire organization.

Currently, the average enterprise company pays for an additional 7.6 apps with the same functionality. With so many SaaS subscriptions and communication apps dispersed across the entire organization, there’s a serious and unnecessary amount of money wasted. In fact, the number of duplicate business tools skyrockets by 80% year over year. 

More likely than not, your business could financially benefit by consolidating your tech stack. But you don’t want to get rid of other helpful tools just to save some cash. Instead, you need business tools that save money and improve workflows, so your team accomplishes more in less time! 

We’ll just go ahead and say it—there are serious justifications for how your business can save with OppBoard.

It’s not just about reducing the number of business tools. With OppBoard, you give your teams the space to collaborate and streamline workflows with an easily-customizable platform that can be tailored to everyone.

And for most businesses, nothing impacts the bottom line quite like productivity!

Why Fewer Business Tools Is More Than Saving Money

Security firm STANLEY Security found themselves siloed across multiple business tools before adopting OppBoard. As a virtual organization, STANLEY needed to take a bottoms up approach to improve processes and collaboration anywhere. 

“As a technology innovation team, we need to stay organized and flexible to adapt to changing project requirement,” said Connor Nash, Global Experience Analytics Manager at STANLEY Security. “We use a variety of project management techniques to reach our goals, and OppBoard has been central to that. We’re able to customize and automate OppBoard to suit each specific initiative, and it has allowed us to streamline and simplify our workflows, which has increased our team’s capacity exponentially.”

The results of moving to a centralized productivity workspace were impressive:

• 8+ hours saved each week on meetings and team updates
• 50% decrease in time spent building and sharing reports
• 80% increase in improved teamwork

So, how else can businesses save with OppBoard? 

Check out five reasons why OppBoard is the most cost-effective collaborative hub to bring work together, across all teams, in one place.

1. Teams work better together under one roof

Jumping back and forth between apps is tiring.

When information is trapped inside business tools, employees get burnt out searching for what they need to get their work done. Research shows 45% of employees believe context switching makes them less productive.

That’s why it’s imperative to get your entire team working together under one roof that’s specifically designed to help teams collaborate from start to finish. A single space makes it easier for teams to reclaim their day and for leads to see real business growth. 

It’s why so many businesses find OppBoard to be a real money-saving solution. Business owners quickly discover how OppBoard cuts down the number of business tools that overlap with our numerous features.

Don’t just take our word for it—Nick Foster, Director of Product Management at Lulu Press, the self-publishing book company, explained how his team immediately saw a 12% increase in work efficiency when using OppBoard as the source of truth for their business. And in the process, the publisher replaced two of its project management tools with one!

When we were using Jira, our developers were updating platform code that wasn’t associated with Jira at all. Then they would have to spend time going back into Jira and manually make a status change. We spent too much time trying to determine feature statuses rather than focusing on delivering them.

2. Unleash knowledge-sharing within a central workspace

Have you ever experienced the pure chaos of trying to locate a document or piece of information when someone is unavailable to help?

It’s not fun.

And what’s worse is how time-consuming file management can be across different apps. The previously mentioned market research shows employees spend on average 59 minutes a day just searching for information hidden in organization business tools.

Without an extensive and searchable knowledge-sharing hub, your team wastes time and money looking for the things they need to get their work done. OppBoard is the right tool to help teams unleash knowledge with its granular search function! 

Also, within the List view, you can use the filter and search features to view, find, or organize tasks in a breeze.

And with commands, you can create tasks and navigate through your Workspace with keyboard shortcuts. This gives your team an even faster way to access the information the need.

Advanced features like search and filter allow organizations to improve file management and file sharing, so everything stays in a single space.

Asset organization is essential if you want to keep your business flexible and employees absorbed in their work. That’s why business owners have to give teams a centralized place to work and quickly find what they need.

3. Get the full picture with extensive and useful features

Businesses just aren’t as efficient when teams use dozens of similar apps instead of the same one. The good news is companies are catching on to the decentralization issues of business tools across teams.

In fact, the 2021 Market Guide for SaaS Management report expects half of organizations will significantly centralize their SaaS applications by 2026. On top of disorganization and expensive duplicate tool lists, business security risks are another can of worms with the rise in business tools—and subsequent—password sharing. 

The problem with most productivity platforms is that they only do a few things really well. Now, compare that to OppBoard’s massive suite of features that help businesses see the full picture of a project.

Chances are you’ve heard of OppBoard. And maybe you’ve compared it to standard project management tools. But what many don’t realize until they’re in OppBoard daily is that this productivity platform does so much more.

So, to give business owners and team leads a better look into its capabilities, we’ll dive into three of the lesser-known OppBoard advanced features helping teams get the complete picture of their work:

Feature 1: Whiteboards 

While there are other similar products available from popular companies like Miro and Mural, OppBoard Whiteboards is the only virtual whiteboard tool that can take your teams’ ideas and turn them into coordinated actions. 

Whether business owners need to brainstorm, strategize, or build agile workflows, OppBoard Whiteboards can do it all! Unlike other whiteboard apps, OppBoard can move an idea into a specific project faster with built-in task management capabilities directly from your Whiteboards. 

It’s a breeze to add context to your workflows with embedded tasks and rich formatting. And anyone across your organization can access and collaborate in real-time as if you were all in the same room!

Feature 2: Annotation and proofing

Graphic design, content marketing, website owners, and product marketing teams review various documents, files, and assets daily. Many of these teams use online tools like Prodigy, Filestage, and Annotate. But OppBoard’s Annotation feature takes it a step further. 

With the annotation and proofing features, project contributors and stakeholders no longer miss important approvals in their inboxes and create longer bottlenecks. Here’s what you can do to expedite feedback and reviews in OppBoard:

• Upload popular file types like PNG, GIF, JPEG, WEBP, and MP4 as task attachments
• Preview all unresolved proofing comments in the To Do section of a task
• Open a comment from the playback bar to proof video content faster
• Use comments to talk about updates directly on the files

Feature 3: Dashboards

This is no ordinary dashboard. In fact, OppBoard’s Dashboard helps a team close to home, the San Diego Padres, run more efficiently! Ken Kawachi, VP of Baseball Operations for the Padres, explained how OppBoard helped his team track and manage project progression, budgeted vs. actual spend, costs, and invoicing—all within a single glance in custom reports.

The MLB team needed a single, centralized tool to manage and track the progress of their suite renovation project at Petco Park. They looked to OppBoard to visually interpret the big picture of those costs, allocated budgets, business growth, and renovation spending in real-time through variance formulas in their OppBoard Dashboard. 

Operations is about finding ways to maintain organization. That includes leveraging technology like OppBoard to make work more efficient and collaboration easier. OppBoard is very clear and concise, yet it allows the end user to customize the platform as much as they’d like based on their preferences. It’s helped me immensely in my day-to-day work.

4. Streamline workflows with advanced customization

Disruption is the bane of productivity. It’s why teams need convenient and easy-to-use business tools to focus on the most engaging work so folks can streamline workflows.

The best way to get there is by providing your team with a powerful tool that can be tailored to their preferences. Avoid the countless onboarding sessions and ever-changing tools brought on by team leads that have come and gone!

OppBoard was built with customizations in mind so different departments aren’t boxed into workflows made for other teams. Whether it’s IT tracking tickets, marketers managing content, or engineers implementing agile workflows, customization becomes crucial when employees are scattered across so many tools (especially with remote teams). 

A team that needed help building more collaborative workflows was the Alumni and Donor Services (ADS) department at Wake Forest University. Morey Graham, Director of ADS Projects, explained how the department struggled to improve productivity because teams wouldn’t budge on their own collaborative efforts.

This had various departments at Wake Forest using Asana, Jira, Trello, Notion, Workfront, and Google Docs to streamline workflows. Teams constantly moved between business tools to find documents, store files across accounts, assign work, provide task updates, and add data. 

Then they decided to give OppBoard a try. 

The team immediately saw an improvement in cross-departmental alignment between team projects as OppBoard became the one true source of information. Dashboard customization let teams get exactly what they needed, so everyone worked from a single hub—something they missed by using several similar tools.

We can now collaborate within one system and have visibility into critical data. This allows our various teams to report progress, identify workload and capacity issues, and plan in a more accurate way.

Morey Graham, Director of ADS Projects @ Wake Forest University

5. Save time with one of the most affordable options

Teams want to save time on the work that matters most, with the context needed to do it—all without the distractions that halt productivity. Business owners also want to do this without breaking the bank.

So what about the actual cost of OppBoard?

And how does it compares to the online business tools you’re already using or considering? You have options, but not many as powerful and affordable as OppBoard. It’s easily one of the best free platforms in the industry. 

See our breakdown of cost per user compared to the leading online tools for productivity:

OppBoard continues to be the best-priced productivity platform in the market, but that doesn’t mean it’s the weakest. Users get more features and customization abilities compared to most of the major productivity tools.

RevPartners, a revops engine building platform, was in a similar situation as Wake Forest University—they had too many apps across the company that do the same thing. Dane Dusthimer, Traffic Partner at RevPartners, explained how after adopting OppBoard, the team consolidated its productivity tools from three to one, which resulted in a 50% cost savings for the organization.

With OppBoard, we can access all the functionality we need in one place, which is huge for us. We’re all about adoption, and without a really easy-to-use platform that can enable it, it would be impossible to drive adoption by all teams and clients.

OppBoard helps business owners keep all of their essential business tools in one place. From documents to tasks to OppBoard communication—you save your team one day every week.