xTasks in Action

xOverTime recently attended the National Association for Environmental Management (NAEM) EHS & Sustainability Software Conference in Houston. In addition to exhibiting our innovative cloud database technology and solutions, we presented how our xTasks solution has saved one of our customers over 1,000 hours of work per year across 15 sites, yielding a payback of less than three months. The client, PCC Airfoils (PCC, a subsidiary of Berkshire-Hathaway), is the leading producer of airfoil castings for various industries such as power generation, oil and gas, general manufacturing, and airline/aerospace.

Before implementing xTasks, PCC had one monolithic Excel® workbook with a tab of EHS compliance tasks for each site which required a manual update process. Task assigners and completers experienced the following challenges, to name a few:

• Excessive cut and paste effort to assign, complete and update tasks
• Time consuming communications to chase down tasks and attachments
• Decreased task completion efficiency due to inconsistent email subject descriptions
• Data Processing problems for calculations and reporting as volume of data increased resulting in the dreaded blue circular processing icon

The solution was to simplify the Excel workflow via the xTasks solution accessing the xOverTime cloud database. The results:

• Improved manageability – With data in the cloud, information is organized and processing data is more efficient in Excel
• Ease of use – Users assign, save and report on tasks directly via familiar Excel tools that also accesses the xOverTime cloud database
• Better organization – Task email notifications for assigners and completers with the ability to provide multiple attachments to either assist the task completer or provide support of tasks completion
• Increased consistency – Emails are properly labeled with the task name, description and status
• Higher-quality reports – Compliance task query and calendar features ease reporting needs
• New options – Other features such as standard and repeating tasks with sunset options are now available

PCC can now manage their compliance tasks efficiently and are looking at other projects that will benefit from xOverTime. For more details, view and download our PCC Airfoils case study here. Plus, reach out to see how xTasks can help improve your task management.