243 - TZL - Reg Prentice

wide range of firms, and it ranges from firms where project numbers and just the basic idea of a project is very fixed within their systems, all the way to firms where they don't even use project numbers outside of accounting. 0:14:45 - (Reg Prentice): So their files on their folder system or their network are organized just by project name without the project number. Again, when you say it, it seems like such a prosaic thing, but project numbering changes over time. You have sub-numbers. Some companies will put the client number in their project number. It's quite a source of debate. It's just how you number projects, how those flow through the proposal stage and issuing proposals, and then into a billable stage, and then into an archive stage. When is a project over like that? 0:15:26 - (Reg Prentice): You know, that's a very subjective thing. So the first thing about Tonic is we organize everything around project numbers. We work with each firm to do a bit of customization about how Tonic will see project numbers in their firm. So we have scripts that we implement on a per-company basis. So some companies will strip off everything after the last Dot. So it's quite common to have a project number and then dot, zero, zero, zero (.000) might be the in quotes main project and then there are sub-projects under that. So we'll often customize the way the project numbers come into Tonic. Nearly all our customers link Tonic to their accounting system so that the projects are automatically generated. But that immediately just gets to the point where you're not going to put every part of every project into a system like Tonic. You want Tonic to represent what is the project from an overall contract point of view, and from a perception point of view as to what the staff perceive as being the bucket called project. 0:16:37 - (Reg Prentice): And then once Tonic is established in the firm, like that, the email file transfers CA information, contact information kind of almost magnetically goes into the projects. We've implemented many different ways to automate, or semi-automate how information gets put in the project, and to make it the easiest path for staff. So if you want to transfer files, it's easier to do it in Tonic than it is to go to your Dropbox or some other system. 0:17:13 - (Reg Prentice): So that over time, you have this confidence that you go to Tonic you just type in any part of the project name or number, you click on it, and voila you have the set of correspondence, aka email, from all the different people in the firm collected in one place that you can reference. You have the file transfers organized by date who they're from and who they're to. You have the CA information, and it's having confidence that that stuff will be there that I think makes a huge difference instead of scrambling through many different systems looking for what you need. There's one place that is properly organized with a clean set of data. 0:17:57 - (Randy Wilburn): Yeah. And, I mean, it sounds like the way you say it, it sounds simple enough, but the reality is that I won't say most, but do you have even an idea of the percentage of firms that don't do or have any type of real structure, like what you've just described across the board in the design industry space. I don't know if there's data behind that. 0:18:19 - (Reg Prentice): I don't know that it's a data-driven opinion. But I would say there are very few firms that we engage with where I would say are close to zero. Pretty much every firm has started the journey and is somewhere along that path. So things like naming the network

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