Item: monday.com
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Return on Investment

monday.com has changed literally everything for us in a positive way. I probably would have quit my job had I not discovered it.
It saves a lot of time when I want to see the status of projects.
monday.com has significantly reduced my email traffic.
Operations are running really smoothly now that we can track projects against milestones.
My boss is finally happy with me!
It has made communication largely automated.
The form view has enabled us to move away from developing our own software and simplified everything so much.
I love how easy it is for me to set up or modify something, if I get a request from collaborators, I can very easily set up an automation to meet their needs.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use monday.com to manage our biotechnology service platforms, to communicate within our research group and with clients using the biotechnology platforms. In addition, we are currently implementing it to manage budgets and administrative tasks involved in laboratory management and procurement. It has made a huge impact on our efficiency and communication. We use monday.com within our research group of about 50 people and to communicate to our industry collaborators across multiple companies and to gather information from them.

Pros and Cons

Automated emails have saved me so many times. I have set up many of our boards to communicate status updates and automatically acknowledge receipt of samples, bookings and information.
Filtering and sharing boards on a dashboard has helped me communicate project overviews in real-time to clients. I have created a client dashboard with all relevant information for their projects. They can easily access and see the status of their projects, this has reduced email traffic.
monday.com helps me to have an overview of my team's activities, so when I have a new task I need to assign I can easily see who has capacity to take on the task.
monday.com keeps track of our due dates and deadlines, so I have set up project milestones and can easily see if we are meeting our targets. This allows us to identify and address problems early.

When sharing boards to a dashboard for clients to view, I would like to be able to hide the chat so that they cannot see messages we send internally.
I would like to have an image widget on the dashboard.
I'd love to have the app work on my phone without data and sync back to monday.com when I have signal again. We work in forestry field trials and in many areas we have no reception. I would love to set up monday.com to allow us to capture sample data in field and then sync back when we have signal, this would be so fantastic and would definitely allow us to extend the functionality to data capture in a really easy manner. I know this is not what it was designed for, but I set up a really nice board with the full layout of our trials and status column to indicate the disease status of trees, whether they were sampled, when and by whom, but I cannot implement this in field because it does not work offline.
I know that monday.com has a lot of functionality for more common job types and I have modified many of the boards to assist in laboratory management. I feel that monday.com has great potential for research laboratories and research service providers and even agricultural field trials. One of the main limitations of working in large scale databases is working offline. If we could have this functionality we could make it really easy to set up the sampling plan, head out into the field and capture the data and then export into an excel spreadsheet for upload into databases.
monday.com has a lot of potential for managing systems in a university setting and I am trying to use our boards as generic templates to allow other laboratories and technology platforms to adopt it easily. It would be great if you had a discount for educational institutes, many of our other software providers offer this to us since we are operating with research funding.

Usability

monday.com is so nice and easy to use. There is a little learning curve when setting everything up, but I thoroughly enjoy the challenge of figuring out how to structure something and the tutorials and help functions are extremely informative. I have also attended several webinars and asked for support directly, I have always found this support excellent and resolved my issues or been directed to a workaround. Also it is visually appealing and I love the dashboard function. I should have mentioned this previously, but I think that monday.com would be even better if you had a nice to do list widget for the dashboard. I like to use Microsoft to-do or Trello and I find that the to-do list widget on monday.com lacks functionality. It is fine if you have a nice and tidy little to-do list, but I have a complex to-do matrix! I would like to be able to have subtasks, labels, groupings and the ability to move tasks from one list to another by dragging and dropping and reminders of deadlines.

Support Rating

Absolutely excellent! They are really very good at resolving issues or suggesting workarounds if functionality is missing. I have however, had others say that monday.com is very hard to get started with and they would love online training sessions, it may be nice to provide these at a cost per hour. Lastly, I have had troubles in the last few months when I have submitted a request for an upgrade on the license to Pro. I keep submitting a request for a quote but I have not had a reply. This has been a bit frustrating and the reason I gave 9/10.

Reliability & Availability

It has been excellent. I think the only slight concerns I have are that sometimes I have to go and check that the automations are still working, I think there has been the odd glitch. Secondly, when duplicating a board, I would like to have the option of duplicating the automations and integrations, it seems I have to set those up again. Lastly, it would be nice to have a restore function locally. We have on some occasions had people delete things and I would like to be able to restore it myself within a week of it happening. After that I think it is reasonable to ask for assistance from monday.com.

Key Insights

Do you think monday.com delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with monday.com's feature set?

Yes

Did monday.com live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of monday.com go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy monday.com again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

monday.com is excellent for managing projects through a predetermined pipeline and monitoring progress against milestones. It is also brilliant for reminding people of scheduled tasks via automated emails and communicating status updates and other information. I also particularly like how easy it is to navigate and the options to add additional apps for greater functionality.

I do however, struggle to adequately manage budgets and finances on Monday.com as I find this process quite cumbersome. I would love to be able to add notes to columns or blocks to provide extra information. For example, we pay overseas service providers and it would be nice to be able to add a note to a formula block to indicate the exchange rate on the date that we made the calculation. Or to add further information on formula columns to describe what was accounted for in the formula.

One other thing I would really like to do would be to create a board with groups that look different. For example, if I have a running budget of R40 000, I'd like to have a group which indicates the total budgeted amount, the amount used up and the balance. Then I'd like a group below with lines indicating the detailed expenses. It would be nice to have these hybrid boards.

monday.com for Scientists: how laboratory, project and client management has changed for the better!

Overall Satisfaction with monday.com