GoSpotCheck by FORM enables brands to streamline their sales and merchandising team's surveys, audits and reports through mobile data collection. Companies can arm their teams with GoSpotCheck's mobile app to get real-time information about merchandising, product line performance and competitive research.
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Smartsheet
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Smartsheet is an online project management and collaboration tool. It includes automated alerts, instantaneous updating and sharing across team members, resource management, nested tasks organized in a hierarchy, a Gantt chart view, exportable and automated reports, and integration with email.
GoSpotCheck has been great when we want to collect data regarding price, number of items, yes or no responses and pictures, however it is not best used as a tool for audited large number or products. It is fairly easy to do this in the app but the data from the backend is a little bit of a nightmare! I'm hoping one day this can be looked into and provide a different way of collecting the multiple select question data to better suit audit data.
For teams and users who are very familiar with Excel and its mode of operation, Smartsheet will feel like a walkover. If you have a number of users who use Excel or Google Sheets for their personal project management then you will find this tool to be very useful and somewhat familiar.
Teams that may be used to other project management suites or styles would find Smartsheet a bit challenging to adapt to, as formulas and formatting can be challenging to adapt to.
Ease of designing and creating survey questions for field team to answer. It was so easy to edit, add or remove questions so that I could alter what I wanted to see in real time.
Ease of completing survey on mobile device. While it was important for the data to be collected, it needed to be done efficiently. The app was easy to use, navigate and made filling out the surveys quick.
Customer Service- whenever we had a question or an issue, customer service was there to solve the problem quickly and effectively. Typically an email was the best way to get a quick answer. Their service and sales teams would also help us build missions to ensure we are capturing the data we want to capture and were able to export it and read it the way we wanted.
Ease of the back end system, not just building missions as previously stated, but also reading and exporting the data and photos collected.
Smartsheet set up is similar to Excel, yet when you upload an Excel file, things like conditional formatting are lost. Smartsheet has its own conditional formatting, and you have to reinstate the rules. It would be great if those would apply automatically once a file is uploaded
Some Smartsheet management and access rules can take some tweaking to work properly. This may be a case of offering more info to admins so they can apply these better and with more efficiency
It definitely meets our needs as far as organizing and archiving our tasks and files. As we train more staff to view it, I see opportunities for more improvement, which I am sure this program can handle. I look forward to seeing continued improvement from Smartsheet on their capabilities and functionality.
Smartsheet is very easy to learn. However, while I have been able to pick it easily, Microsoft Excel and Project super users that I have trained on Smartsheet get bogged down in the differences and can find it frustrating. Explaining the differences ahead of time and why Smartsheet is being chosen instead of a different software seems to counteract those reactions
I give this rating because it fills a niche in the market. MS Project scares many away from proper task management but there are limited tools our there, especially cloud-based that are mobile-friendly. Smartsheet fills this market gap, especially for small to medium-sized businesses. IT is not fair to compare it to MS Project, but fairer to see what gaps it fills.
It's absolutely paramount to take a few minutes to actually play with the software. It's nearly impossible to do anything wrong or make a mistake which cannot be fixed easily. Under the help menu is Live Training option. After you familiarize yourself with the commands, watch the live training for some in depth understanding of how to make the software fit your needs perfectly.
We used to use a product called "Stay in Front." This was a product that was used prior to my arrival at Alliance so I don't know a lot of the ins and outs regarding comparison. I have heard that Stay in Front had a much better auditing system, however retrieving pictures from the software was a little cumbersome and not as efficient as what GSC has set up for its users. The ability to pull data quickly and consistently for our clients is so important and one of the reasons why we made the switch. GSC is also often updating and upgrading the software to include more functionality and this is something we can really take hold of.
Jira and Redmine are much more robust and technologically advanced project management solutions. I enjoy using either when managing a very large project. However, I prefer to use Smartsheet for my smaller to medium sized projects. As for Google Drive - I would say that Google sheets and Smartsheet are almost identical in my opinion when it comes to functionality. Personally I prefer to manage smaller projects via Google Drive, but it is a personal preference!
The ROI was difficult to measure in dollars or units, but the data and intel we were able to collect and provide to our buying teams and use internally was invaluable. We no longer have the team collecting data in the field and it's a huge miss.
Alerted marketing team of competitor's promotions, merchandising and POP
Alerted product team of new products coming to market, feedback on new products in market, and consumer feedback on our products
Visibility to inventory standings and areas that needed improvement
A way to track in store planogram changes and total SKU count by brand - used to leverage our products in line review meetings
Ability to capture endless photos of merchandising and new products to have a visual at meetings
