17 hours given back every week
to the Studio Laurence Hébert team.

The context

The studio designs and oversees interior architecture projects, from the first sketch to the end of construction. A small team runs about fifteen projects at once. Each project means client meetings, site visits, and orders with some twenty furniture brands.

The problems

• Every meeting and every site visit ended with a report redone by hand: dictated, retyped, formatted, then sent.
• Project tracking lived in a shared Word document that only one person could edit at a time.
• Each team member's hours were written down by hand, then copied into Excel. There was no quick way to tell whether a project was going over the time its fees allowed for.
• Every supplier invoice was checked by hand against its order and its payment before going to the accounting firm.

The goals

What we built

• A project workspace for the whole teamA secure web app for desktop, tablet and phone. Projects, tasks, schedule and documents in one place, with different access rights for the studio owner and for team members.
• Automatic meeting notesThe meeting is recorded, and the notes write themselves, with decisions and tasks. The owner approves them, then assigns each task: the person is notified right away.
• Site reports on the floor planOn a tablet, you drop a number on the plan and talk. The report comes out as a table, point by point, ready for the contractors.
• Hours tracked by projectEveryone logs their hours at the end of the day. The owner sees the time spent by project, by person, by week and by month.
• Supplier invoice checksEach invoice is matched with its order and its payment. The owner approves, then the batch goes to the accounting firm.
• Voice dictation on the team's computersWe installed OpenWhispr and set it up for the trade: hold a key, speak, and clean text is typed into the current email or note, with acronyms and materials spelled right.

The results

• The report is ready when the meeting ends: the team reviews it instead of retyping it.
• The whole team works in the same app, at the same time, without getting in each other's way.
• The owner sees at a glance who is doing what, and the time spent on each project.
• The team's work has reorganized itself around the app, with almost no friction.

Estimates · reports 9 hours, team tracking 6 hours and supplier invoices about 2 hours a week (8 hours a month), valued at $49.80 per fully loaded hour (France's average hourly labor cost, €44.20, converted to dollars), 45 working weeks. Full time: 35 hours a week.