“Small speedboat instead of cumbersome freighter”
This is how Patrick Plogstedt, one of the founders and partners of TankTank, describes the benefits of his company's way of working for the customer. He explains: “With our tanking concept and our large network of freelancers, we are able to bring together the most suitable talent in a project team for every project. In doing so, we deliberately refrain from the “organizational overhead” that traditionally exists in advertising agencies and are also taking into account the increasing desire of many creative people for freelance “remote” work. ”
However, the TankTank concept of a virtual agency with agile project-related collaboration between different freelancers poses a very particular challenge when it comes to project controlling.
With an ever increasing number of tank projects, it quickly became clear that manual project controlling, as in the early days, is no longer useful. For this reason, after only about one year of existence, TankTank decided to introduce the cloud-based software ZEP for these tasks. ZEP stands for time recording for projects. The web-based solution has been on the market since 2000 and offers project-oriented companies a complete solution for time recording and reporting, travel expenses, project management and controlling, and invoicing.
Patrick Plogstedt remembers: “I found out about ZEP from a friend who had already used the solution in his company. Based on this recommendation and after a corresponding evaluation, we then decided to introduce the solution to TankTank as well. ”
All project employees working in a tank now record their completed project work times and generally use ZEP's mobile apps available for all common operating systems. The complete document entry is also carried out via ZEP. This also applies to third-party services. Mr. Plogstedt explains:
“The allocation of all external services to the corresponding project is essential for a freelancer network such as TankTank to ensure that profitability is right at all times.”
Patrick Plogstedt
Founder and Partner TankTank
In addition to pure time recording, TankTank also uses the ZEP Offers module and the ZEP Billing module for billing. For this purpose, all data stored in ZEP time recording is automatically transferred to the invoice. Patrick Plogstedt explains:
“A consistent workflow from offer to invoice for each individual tank was an important decision criterion for us when choosing an appropriate software solution. ”
Patrick Plogstedt
Founder and Partner TankTank
ZEP offers exactly this integrated workflow on a uniform user interface.
Use as a cloud service: IT should also remain lean
The TankTank concept of a virtual agency with agile, independent freelancer project teams also has an impact on the IT sector, of course. “Our premise of not building up any overhead at TankTank also means, of course, that we want to remain as lean as possible in IT,” explains Mr. Plogstedt. For this reason, it was almost obvious not to use ZEP in-house, but as a cloud service.
TankTank employees access ZEP's cloud-based software variant via the Internet. It is operated in an ISO 27001-certified high-performance data center in Germany. The basis for use is an online user contract that can be cancelled at any time at the end of the month and an order processing contract in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Billing is based on usage per user and month.
When asked what role data protection and GDPR compliance play for him when using a cloud solution, Patrick Plogstedt explains:
“Although this topic does not play a central role in our projects, the fact that all requirements are met when using ZEP conveys a high level of security and trust. ”
Patrick Plogstedt
Founder and Partner TankTank
ZEP: Focused, Functional, Intuitive
After almost two years of working with ZEP, Patrick Plogstedt draws the following conclusion:
“ZEP can do a great deal, but still focuses on the functions required for project controlling. The interface is very intuitive and clear, even though it is certainly not 'hip' for us as creative minds and advertisers from a design or UI point of view. But that is also not important when it comes to time recording and project controlling. ”
Patrick Plogstedt
Founder and Partner TankTank
