De Dietrich is a family-owned company founded in 1684 that specializes in manufacturing equipment and process technologies for four major sectors: pharmaceuticals, chemicals, plant chemistry, and food processing. The group operates 25 sites worldwide and employs approximately 1,400 people.
Sébastien Heitz has been IT Group Project Manager at De Dietrich for nearly four years. Before joining the group, he held various positions in the fields of data, document management, web development, and customer relationship management.
« Currently, we manage only IT projects in Gouti, including both application projects and network infrastructure projects.
We’re also exploring industrial projects. We have teams and project managers at various sites working for our clients, and we’ve already considered using Gouti for these types of projects as specifically to track the time spent by engineering teams. For now, that hasn’t come to fruition yet, but it’s an idea we might revisit. »
« When I joined De Dietrich, we were practically starting from scratch. There wasn’t really a project management tool in place just Excel spreadsheets, both for tracking projects and for tracking the time spent by the teams.
Since I had already worked with project management solutions in my previous roles, I quickly realized that we were missing something. So I pushed the issue internally, particularly with our CIO.
Beyond implementing a tool, this was also an opportunity to examine our own IT project management processes, formalize them, and disseminate them throughout the IT teams.
One of the main challenges also involved reporting. Even though tracking systems already existed in Excel, our CIO had to manually consolidate information from multiple files and various team members to report it to senior management. It was extremely time-consuming. Centralizing all of this in a single tool and being able to easily export the data saved us a tremendous amount of time. »
« We didn’t evaluate a huge number of solutions. We mainly focused on two tools, one of which I had already had the opportunity to use before.
For my part, I had already heard of Gouti, mainly through word of mouth and local contacts, since our headquarters are based in Schiltigheim.
Ultimately, what made us lean toward Gouti was above all its simplicity and intuitiveness, which were clearly decisive factors. We were looking for a tool that employees could easily adopt without complicating their daily work.
The data extraction and reporting capabilities also weighed heavily in the decision. We needed a tool capable of centralizing information and saving us time in tracking projects and time spent.
Finally, the entire dashboard and data visualization aspect aligned well with what we were looking for. »
« The implementation went very smoothly. We worked with Sean, our account manager, and everything went quite smoothly.
There were a few specific configurations to set up at the start, but overall it went very well. At the same time, we also took advantage of the project to formalize our internal IT project management processes.
Then, we communicated with the teams during regular meetings organized by the CIO. We shared all the documentation and organized a short internal presentation session.
We were kind of in a “train the trainer” mindset! We had been supported by Sean, and then we took over internally to train the teams. It was also a good way for us to get comfortable with the tool.
Adoption happened naturally, and we didn’t encounter any particular difficulties. That said, I always put things into perspective a bit because I think we use Gouti in very simple ways. »
« Currently, we don’t have any collaborative projects between France and Germany. German projects are managed by the German teams and French projects by the French teams, but Gouti gives the CIO a comprehensive overview of all projects.
However, Gouti already provides a great deal of visibility between the teams, particularly regarding schedules and project progress.
If we were to have more joint projects between the two countries in the future, this could bring even more benefits. »
« The main benefit is the visibility into time spent and the analysis of discrepancies between planned and actual time spent.
It’s also very useful for identifying schedule deviations and for conducting post-project reviews or analyses.
But above all, the reporting feature saves us a tremendous amount of time. Now, all we have to do is extract the data from Gouti to send the necessary information to management or accounting.
In particular, we have a very large group-wide project launched last year that also involves business-specific roles. Very quickly, we needed to track the time spent by these teams for accounting purposes. This led us to consider expanding the use of Gouti to other teams so that we could have a single, unified time-tracking tool. »
« The feedback has been very positive. Teams find the tool easy to use and not too burdensome for time tracking.
I also think there was a real effort to educate people beforehand. When employees aren’t used to tracking their time, they can sometimes feel apprehensive or as though they’re being monitored. But we explained the process thoroughly, and it went very smoothly.
Today, we haven’t received any specific negative feedback. However, since our use of the tool remains relatively simple, we haven’t yet reached a point where teams are requesting very specific changes or advanced features. »
« We haven’t had a lot of interactions, but the ones we’ve had have always been positive.
In particular, I attended a Users’ Club seminar in Strasbourg a few years ago, and I really enjoyed the energy of the day.
What I found particularly interesting was the focus on the product roadmap. Christian presented the planned updates while leaving plenty of room for user feedback to help prioritize needs.
This collaborative approach to the tool’s development is something I really appreciated. »
« Intuitive, practical, and accessible. »
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