Your technology tool stack can be a blessing and a curse. The right tools make your team more productive and your business more competitive and help you ensure ROI in all areas of your work.
But just like in a game of Tetris, if you don’t stack your tech tools right, you’re looking at a disconnected mess that just keeps piling on problems rather than solving them — especially when it comes to your project management tools.
Consider this: The average worker only spends 2.8 hours each day on productive tasks. On one hand, this could be due to unengaged employees misusing time, but even that may be an underlying symptom of a more treacherous virus.
According to Symantec, the average enterprise company uses over 900 cloud applications to manage its processes. Another survey reported that 68% of workers switch apps 10 times an hour and waste a full hour a day switching apps.
On top of this, an IDC survey found that 36% of a worker's day is spent looking for and consolidating information across systems, and HBR found only 44% of employees said they knew where to find the information they need.
To tie all of these staggering stats together, our project management for professional services survey revealed that one of the top challenges teams face is disconnected tools and manual work required to consolidate data across systems.
Using too many tools that don’t connect makes resource management, communication, and project collaboration difficult. Poorly integrated systems trigger sloppy handoffs, version control issues, lost details, and more. Accurate reporting and optimized workflows become impossible with pieces of projects living across multiple platforms.
The good news? You have a plethora of tools at your fingertips to solve all your project management problems. The bad news? If those tools don’t connect, your problems stack up quickly.
That’s why integrations and flexibility are so critical here at Wrike. Wrike Integrate empowers your team to connect with 400+ applications — automating your workflows like never before. Here are Wrike integrations that will inspire you to build a tech stack for hyper-growth.
Wrike Integrations that inspire highly productive teams
1. Keep assets organized with Wrike and your DAM
Top-performing teams know brand consistency is critical to growing customer awareness. With scams looming around every corner, customers are hypervigilant of logos, ads, and messaging that simply don’t look or feel right. But actually maintaining a consistent identity with your digital assets? It’s a challenge.
Creating a single repository of updated assets can be painfully manual, but it’s worth it. Externally, it helps build consumer trust. Internally, it saves workers an average of 2.5 hours per day that’s spent looking for up-to-date files, which costs companies upwards of $2.5 million in lost productivity a year.
With team members across your organization leveraging different tools, it can be hard for marketing and creative teams to establish a single asset location where outside teams can easily find assets. This results in the all-too-relatable and repetitive ad hoc IMs, emails, and hallway chats that create a poor work intake process. That’s where a DAM tool comes in.
DAM stands for digital asset management, and it helps companies manage, organize, share, and distribute digital assets from within one central library. It improves productivity and increases content’s ROI. Almost any digital file can be managed within a DAM, like images, PDFs, presentations, video, audio, and more.
From a project management perspective, using Wrike and a DAM ensures brand consistency across projects, keeping creatives in the tools they love while making it easy for outside teams to locate assets. With Wrike, you have project communication in one place, making it easy to collaborate on asset design with tools like Wrike Proof and Publish. Once an asset is approved and uploaded into your DAM library, you can add relevant categories, metadata, and keywords to optimize discoverability.
Today, Wrike integrates with two amazing DAM platforms: MediaValet and Bynder. Read more about our connections with both tools and learn how to choose the right DAM for your needs.
To learn more about how DAMs and CWMs are better together, watch our webinar with MediaValet. You’ll learn how Miles Partnerships leverages their tools to create a project workflow that keeps their creatives in the zone while optimizing productivity.
2. Maximize reporting with Wrike and our BI connector
Reporting is hard. Mic drop. Seriously though, anyone who has to work with reporting can attest to the rabbit hole of data you often find yourself in. However, these days, data is king, and you need the right tools to help you manage your castle.
Wrike comes fully stocked with capabilities to provide reports that give you greater visibility into project performance. However, Wrike also knows that your team might want to leverage your Wrike data with external data. Or you might want to share your project data with external teams. That’s why we’ve created a BI connector with Tableau.
Tableau is a business intelligence solution that helps you analyze and visualize your data. With our Tableau connector, you can automatically pull data from your Wrike account to Tableau. You can use this data to build custom reports and merge it with data pulled from other tools and applications. You can also synthesize data, creating reports and dashboards in Tableau that incorporate Wrike data and data from other sources.
Wrike’s created a few sample Tableau dashboards so that you can start reporting on your Wrike data quickly. Those dashboards are:
- The Projects Portfolio Dashboard
- User Activity Dashboard
Learn more about our Wrike integration with Tableau!
Bonus! Does your company use a BI tool other than Tableau? You can manually connect Wrike to it by exporting your Wrike data to a .csv file, then importing that file into your BI tool. Or if you have developers, you can connect automatically using our BI export API.
3. Keep creatives in the tools they love with Wrike and Adobe
Is your creative team bogged down with administrative tasks? Does feedback live across emails, notebooks, and spreadsheets? Is your intake process a mess? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, you could be bleeding your team dry of creative productivity.
A recent study conducted at the University of California, Irvine indicated that most people take 23 minutes and 15 seconds to recover from an interruption. In an 8-hour work day, this is actually a pretty long time and can really add up. This is especially true for creatives who rely on being in a state of flow to produce their best work.
Wrike's integration with the Adobe Creative Cloud is just one of the ways we empower creatives to seamlessly move between the administrative side of their work and the creative side. They can create Wrike tasks right from Adobe and link Adobe file attachments to those tasks.
Creatives can work on designs in Adobe, upload them to Wrike, and then tag whoever is responsible for reviewing and approving them. This integration keeps creatives in the zone and the tools they love, while providing an easy platform for external team members to give feedback — making proofing and approvals seamless.
Today, OSF HealthCare is able to crush creative projects 50% faster with our Wrike and Adobe integration. The OSF HealthCare creative team produces amazing marketing assets for 13+ hospitals and medical facilities. However, their creative team struggled to manage the increasing volume of work as they were getting 400+ creative requests a month!
Heidi Wessler, Graphic Design Coordinator at OSF Healthcare, shares, “Adobe is a world-class creative suite and it's wonderful to be able to work with a project management system that has partnered with Adobe to make the life of a designer easier. I can click into Wrike directly from InDesign and review a task description really fast, or copy and paste asset copy and work that way.”
Andrea Bonk, Program Manager of Market Research and Operations, adds,“Yesterday we ended up having to send a one-off, high-priority patient email communication. Because we had Wrike and the Adobe extension, the ability to proof, load, and comment was easily 50% faster than it would have been otherwise.”
Learn more about Wrike’s integration with Adobe!
4. Keep communication clear with Wrike integrations for Slack and Gmail
As your company grows, so do collaboration challenges. Having relaxed communication processes between a few people is manageable, but wires get crossed when more people are added to the mix. Delays, lost projects, forgotten requests, and other types of miscommunication ultimately stem from disconnected collaboration.
Centralizing your project-centric communication and collaboration in Wrike makes workflows so much more productive. However, there will always be a need for communication tools like email and IMs. A quick question here, an email thread with an outside party there, and everything in between is still critical to business communication. That’s where Wrike’s integrations with Slack and Gmail come in handy. Wrike integrates with the two to make project management and communication more fluid. At a base level, these two integrations with Wrike have very similar use cases, but let’s dive a little more into the nuances of each.
Slack
Slack is a real-time communication tool that allows team members to talk about everything from quick side questions to casual conversation while still documenting the discussion. Wrike integrates directly with Slack so your team can move fluidly between platforms.
For example, Unbounce uses Wrike and Slack to help marketers and digital agencies increase their website and campaign conversions. Unbounce’s customized landing page platform has powered 250+ million conversions for 14,000+ companies across the globe.
Chelsea Scholz is the Marketing Manager of Brand Promotion and shares, “We love the Slack integration! With Wrike’s Slack integration, teams can create new Wrike tasks, receive real-time project notifications, and view task previews without leaving Slack. I want to empower my team to work independently in the way they like, even if it’s hiding in a corner in a bean bag chair somewhere. But I still need to know what's going on.”
Learn more about Wrike’s integration with Slack!
Gmail
Gmail is a work necessity for internal and external communication. But while Gmail can be an excellent way to archive conversations, teams require much deeper visibility into project progress and accountability.
With Wrike for Gmail, you bring collaborative work management right into your inbox. Create tasks straight from your email and get work out of email and into Wrike, where it can be better managed, tracked, and reported on. You can also automate Wrike so it sends notifications to your email or that of a stakeholder to let everyone know about important project updates or status changes.
True Colors United, a national nonprofit dedicated to ending homelessness among LGBTQ youth, uses Wrike’s integration with Gmail to save hours. Chief Creative Officer Joe Moran shares, “Creating Wrike tasks from within Gmail is the best integration we could ever ask for. It allows us to spend less time in our email inboxes and more time in Wrike — which leads to greater productivity. It was really hard to manage things before. Now, we can actually empty out our inboxes, create tasks from email, and it puts the body of the email into a task.”
Learn more about Wrike’s integration with Gmail!
Ready to integrate your work management tech stack?
With Wrike Integrate, you can connect Wrike with hundreds of business apps such as a CRM (e.g., Salesforce), marketing (e.g., Marketo or Mailchimp), accounting (e.g., QuickBooks or NetSuite), or HR (e.g., Workday) system and more.
How to categorize professional services in Quickbooks
Wrike has the integrations you need to optimize your workflows, minimizing the time spent switching between tools or looking for assets so your team can maximize productivity. Leveraging Wrike is like getting the exact Tetris piece you need every time. Here are some other tools Wrike integrates with:
- Salesforce
- Microsoft
- Zapier
- Jira
- GitHub
- SAML
- Dropbox
- And 400+ cloud and on-premises tools
Try Wrike Integrate today and explore all the different tools you can seamlessly streamline into your project management.
