The Ahain Group Partners with Collaborative Work Platform, Podio

The Ahain Group are delighted to announce a new strategic partnership with Podio, the collaborative work platform with a brilliant new take on how everyday work gets done. Podio is a new way of working; it puts you in control of your work, rather than the other way around.

What is Podio?

Podio unites your team, content, tasks and communications, enabling you to manage projects and run business processes like sales, recruiting and more – without email overload and document chaos.

Podio saves time, cuts costs and improves efficiency by adapting to your work style. Anyone can customise Podio workspaces with Podio apps that structure work to enhance collaboration with clients and colleagues.

Communication is handled in social activity streams, that improve transparency and speed up decision making. Being web-based and with free apps for iPhone, iPad and Android you can get work done wherever you’re most efficient.

Podio was founded in Copenhagen in early 2009 with the first customers signed up by August of that year. Since then the customer base has grown at a rapid rate. The company was acquired by Citrix Systems in 2012 and now over 200,000 organisations enjoy the speed of getting work done on Podio.

Why did we partner with Podio?

The Ahain Group are always looking for ways to streamline our work and strengthen our relationships. Our work requires us to digest and manage our client’s information. Each customer is unique in terms of their business goals as are the tactics that we implement to deliver as part of their strategic plan. At any one time, our customers, team and associates can be based in various locations within Ireland and abroad.

“We needed a technology that would solve complex challenges, get our work done and ensure that our team have the tools to deliver a world-class service” explains John Twohig, The Ahain Group Managing Partner who went on to say:

“At The Ahain Group we believe that, before advising others, we ourselves must walk the walk. When we needed a solution we undertook to research the market to find the best product available. The platform should be capable of client and project management, document sharing and storage, be accessible via all devices, secure, flexible and integrate with the fast-moving digital age we live in. The one platform which stood above the crowd was Podio. We are very happy that we have now become their “Preferred Partner” in Ireland.

The Ahain Group Associate, Eileen McCabe, who had the task of finding the best solution to suit our needs, explains:

“After researching a range of collaboration tools and platforms to establish the one that would best enhance The Ahain Group’s business flow we found that Podio was the perfect choice. Instead of having to organise our internal processes, workflow management and CRM around a generic structure, we found that, with Podio, we had the ability to customise workspaces and applications to incorporate our business strategy in the way that suited our internal management flow best.

The great thing about Podio is that if you do not find an application that suits a particular business strategy, you can use the in-built App Builder tool to optimize business solutions in the most efficient way possible. Podio’s unique flexibility allows the platform to be managed and constructed so that workflow processes and communications are efficient, effective and productive, all in the one place.”

Clonmel Chamber of Commerce

Clonmel Chamber of Commerce started using Podio in 2012, CEO, Brian Cleary describes how Podio has helped the organisation: ” We were using ACT 2010 and Excel individually to do lists, Mailchimp, Evernote and many other services. The problem was that there was a disconnect between those programmes and the team. I read about Podio and within five minutes of clicking the link, I had created my first app on Podio. It immediately made sense.

It acts as a CRM, although I prefer to call it a member relationship management system. Our work involves meeting hundreds of business people every month. Every one of these interactions is tracked in an app that we’ve built called ‘Touchpoints’. Different things matter to different business people. Tracking what matters enables us to see trends emerging and allows us to sort out an issue before it becomes a problem for the business community. The Chamber Database workspace contains all the contact information of all of the businesses that we deal with. We use the App Reference mechanism liberally to cross reference event bookings, issues, products bought, sectoral interests and more. In a way it is our attempt to build a big data picture of local businesses.”

What next for the Ahain Group and Podio?

The Ahain Group and Podio share a philosophy: “it’s not about technology, it’s about people”. The digital workplace we’ve built using Podio allows our team and clients to collaborate on, participate in and manage the success of their engagement - at every step and from anywhere.

As Partners in Ireland, The Ahain Group will shortly organise “Podio Centric” events at different locations, to help existing Podio users leverage more value from the platform and to introduce it to others.

Our goal is to make work places in Ireland as efficient and as stress free as possible.