Eccovia Solutions

Eccovia Solutions (formerly ClientTrack) began as a small services provider for county government agencies in California but has grown rapidly and now provides custom solutions for more than 1300 clients across North America. These clients include homeless coalitions, faith-based organizations, and community action agencies, each with varying needs.

But as the company grew, it became difficult to communicate with co-workers and clients. According to Sam Taylor, director of product management, one of the company’s big problems was with information sharing. As they conduct business analysis and implement software solutions, there’s a lot of information floating around, from stacks of documents to charts and diagrams to project documentation.

Sam and his team members needed a tool that could provide open communication.

“As a company, we’re extremely collaborative. We’ve got a lot of smart people and so we like to draw different opinions and perspectives on things—especially because we work with such a broad array of human services organizations.”

That’s where Lucidchart and G Suite came into play.

Moving to G Suite

Eccovia Solutions first made the move to G Suite. For years they had used Microsoft Office products as their communication and collaboration tools. Then they started looking at Google products.

After evaluating the options, the Eccovia Solutions team decided to integrate their domain with G Suite. This move provided employees with several useful tools—both the development and business sides now utilize Google Docs to organize client documentation and work in sync with colleagues. Hangouts is popular among Eccovia Solutions colleagues for its simple video and chat capabilities.

Burke Rich, a quality assurance analyst for Eccovia Solutions, has had the chance to see G Suite transitions at more than one organization. He said,

“The number one thing that makes G Suite different—which I’ve seen both here and at other companies I’ve worked for—is the ability to collaborate. It’s very easy to see people’s calendars, share documents, bring co-workers into a conversation through Hangouts, or collaborate inside a given document.”

For example, while doing QA work with another employee on a large project, Burke and his team member can look at the same document, marking what they’re working on and leaving little notes for each other. They can be in separate places in the document and move back and forth to check each others’ progress. As a result, Burke was able to complete the project in half the time he anticipated thanks to this flow of information.

Adding the power of Lucidchart

Affordable software solutions didn’t stop at G Suite. After realizing that their company didn’t have enough Microsoft Visio licenses to go around, Sam began searching for alternatives. He started testing several diagramming platforms but was sold when he found Lucidchart.

“When I used Visio, it was hard to overcome the learning curve and actually work. I noticed with Lucidchart that I was able to build a flowchart in just a few minutes.”

Sam recommended the platform for the entire company. Employees across the org now use the online application to build process flows, workflows, entity-relationship diagrams, and other business-critical charts. And since Lucidchart is integrated with G Suite and Google Drive, team productivity and efficiency has risen on all levels. It’s easy for workers to open the application from their Google environment, back up diagrams to Drive, and even insert Lucidchart documents into a Google Doc. These features make it simple for dozens of users to work together from any location at any time.

Lucidchart and G Suite provide Eccovia Solutions with the ability to communicate quickly and clearly between their sales team, project analysts, and solutions engineers. These online solutions also facilitate better communication between the company and end users—all for an affordable price.