Motion helps Ally Advantage get more done without working more hours | Motion Case Studies | Motion

Meet Ally Advantage

Headquarters

United States

Industry

IT Services

Company Size

25-50

Coverage

500 locations, 18 states

About the organization

Ally Advantage is a Managed IT provider that helps businesses streamline their technology needs by acting as a single point of contact for Internet, VoIP, and IT services. With a mix of partnerships with major providers and their own boutique offerings, Ally simplifies IT management for clients across more than 400 locations in 18 states.

Pain points

• Hours a week wasted on manually coordinating projects: "assessing due dates, stages, blocking relationships, and manually planning around them - we wasted a lot of time," Joel shares.
• Updating an entire project was painful whenever one thing changed: "Let’s say we get a call that an internet installation for a construction project didn’t happen as planned, we weren’t just moving one task—we had to manually update every related task across the entire project. It was time-consuming, frustrating, and left too much room for error."
• Bad resource allocation and capacity planning were detrimental to Ally's business: Joel needed to know availability of his staff to be able to get clients' jobs done and to assign work to the right people: "Zoho Projects, which we used previously, had resource allocation reports that were not useful - it didn’t integrate with Microsoft 365."
• Not knowing when a project will actually finish: "One of my biggest frustrations was: if I was speaking to a client and they asked where we were on a project, it was very difficult and took way too long to get up to speed. I hated that."
• "I felt frustrated and stuck - We built workflows, managed dependencies, and set up custom automations—yet it felt like we were spending more time wrestling with Zoho than actually working on our projects." Joel told us.

Challenges

Ally previously used Zoho for project management but they wasted too much time manually planning projects and coordinating capacity planning.

They tried everything:

"We looked at Monday, Trello, ClickUp, and Asana. I thought they were a bit better, but the changes wouldn't be significant enough to offset the investment in changing platforms. Until we found Motion - it does resource allocation so well. That's the most important part of our business,"—Joel Peeples, CEO of Ally

The Solution

Motion's AI project manager saves hours on each project

Motion automatically updates the rest of project when a single thing changes, such as one task getting delayed:

"It used to be that: if we changed one deadline, we'd have to update 20 more. With Motion - we can just make the change, and tell Motion to handle the rest."

And when tasks get done, the project automatically progresses itself to the next stage, without any human intervention needed.

"Motion's released an AI project generator and tons of other awesome features this year - it feels like I have a team of 50 developers working for Ally full-time. That's crazy."

The AI project workflow generator reduces the amount of time it takes to create a workflow from hours to minutes.

Automated resource allocation and capacity planning: reports and alerts

"Motion takes the step out of compiling the resource report and analyzing it - Motion can just automatically tell me if something will fit, and it'll also tell me when it'll fit. It just really helps with resource allocation."

Motion does this by automatically planning and coordinating across thousands of tasks across the entire company - by looking at their deadlines, stages, dependencies, priorities, and plans them against employees' time.

And that helps a ton with predicting when a project will actually finish:

"To me, what's critical with Motion - I can go into a project while talking to a customer on the phone, and in just a few seconds of reviewing the project I can tell them exactly where we are and the ETA. When we tried other project management tools, none of them had resource allocation figured out - that's the biggest thing in project management. You'd waste a ton of money if you don't have good resource allocation; it impacts everything - cycles management, timeline of deliverables - everything will suffer. Motion ensures we have the best cycle times and shortest deliverable timeline. So in the case of Motion, the investment to move to a new project management tool paid for itself many times over."

Workflow templates help flesh out projects better

Motion helps Joel's team plan out a project more clearly and completely:

"Zoho had project and task templates, but we’d still spend up to an hour setting up a new project. Not having stages in Zoho was a killer - it’s so much easier to set up projects now."

Easy onboarding and intuitive interface for employees

"My staff initially thought the change would take a lot of effort. But we were running projects in Motion within a week - the platform is very intuitive and responsive. My staff found it easy to learn and use, and we were very impressed with how responsive it was. Everything we were doing in Zoho, Motion does better and faster. Motion’s support has been amazing."

Your team isn't lazy. Your tools aren't smart.

Let Motion plan for you.

The Impact

• Motion helps Ally stays ahead of its competition as a business: "Motion helps us be state of art - be cutting edge - so our business can stay ahead of others. By using Motion, Ally's customers will say the same thing about Ally - that we are leveraging the best tech to help us."
• Motion has tripled our project coordinator's productivity: "The 1 project coordinator can now do the work of 3 project coordinators, thanks to Motion."
• Instead of feeling 'frustrated and stuck,' Joel now 'feels relieved': With Motion, Joel knows project management will be smooth and projects will be done on-time - and if Motion predicts there's not enough capacity, it’s very easy to resolve it, often weeks or months in advance of the deadline, giving their team plenty of time to react and plan accordingly.

Gary Yin
Head of Growth at Motion

Your team isn't lazy. Your tools aren't smart.

Let Motion plan for you.