How to streamline your workflow with Airtable and Smarter Business Processes

Smarter training adjusted to suit your real needs

At Smarter Business Processes we offer a wide variety of Smartsheet training courses and packages.

Our team of certified consultants provides training and remote support to clients around the globe, improving their Project Management, Workflow and Process Management.

Emma Stevens

Office Manager

Emma has 27 years of financial and customer experience and brings processes and order to our office.

Emma's customer service knowledge ensures all of our clients office enquiries are dealt with professionally, efficiently and quickly. She will leave no stone unturned to get to the bottom of a query!

When not at her desk Emma enjoys spending time with her husband and daughter as well running Brownies and Rainbows for Girlguiding UK in her local area.

Etienne Mermillod

Software Development Manager

Etienne is a seasoned ASP.NET Core Full Stack Developer. He takes great pride in building world-class applications while carefully considering the needs of its users and ease of use.

Originally from France, Etienne now calls Canada Home, where he is part of SBP Canada as a member of the API Solutions Development Team.

Etienne is a well-seasoned traveler and has visited many countries where he usually takes the path less traveled in order to backpack around and soak in the local cultures.

When not coding away, you may expect Etienne to be playing with his huge and fluffy dog Indianna or gaming away on League of Legends

David Bower

Smartsheet, Airtable and AppSheet Consultant

David is a hugely experienced Consultant, Customer Care Specialist and Client Account Manager.

In his spare time, David plays guitar, is learning to ride a motorcycle and, when it’s not too cold, can often be found tinkering in the garage. He also intends to learn to play the piano too - one day

Debbie Sawyer

Chief Smartsheet Solutions Officer (CSSO)

BSc (Hons) Computing, ITIL Foundation, Smartsheet Certified User, Aligned Sales Certified and Professional Services Certified.

Seasoned Smartsheet consultant and Training professional, Debbie’s creativity, attention to detail, willingness to deliver solutions to fully meet customer requirements and her personable manner earn her excellent client feedback.

When not working, Debbie likes to relax by spending quality time with her family. Living in the New Forest sees her taking many walks through the woods and down to the sea fronts at Lepe and Calshot. Debbie is also a keen hula hooper and has been hooping now for more than 7 years! She owns at least 10 hoops and enjoys a great workout helping her friend to run a hula hoop fitness class.

Dr James Harris

Chief Technology Officer

An experienced IT professional, James' prior work spans diverse environments from the white heat of launching information systems in one of the world's busiest airports, to industry leading tech startups. He also has extensive experience as a Finance Manager. James brings a keen insight and and flair for problem solving to every project.

Outside of work, James writes comedy, and has had many television credits over the past couple of decades on shows such as Horrible Histories and Russell Howard's Good News. He retains a burning ambition to be as funny as his wife and daughter.

Ph.D. Biochemical Physics, IT and Accounting professional.

Gwen Rymill

Communications Director

Co-founder of Smarter Business Processes, Gwen’s multi tasking roles include ensuring our clients receive the very best in customer care, while responsible for sales and marketing and partner liaison. Just don’t expect to get the cup of tea she promised you!

Away from work Gwen enjoys cycling, pilates, tap dancing and just loves baking.

Richard Rymill

CEO

Co-Founder and Lead Consultant, Richard set up SBP in response to worldwide demand from businesses wanting to implement their own Smarter Business Processes. His rapidly expanding team of experienced Smartsheet and AppSheet Consultants and Trainers share the company's values of achieving improved efficiencies and collaboration by putting people first and releasing them from unnecessary repetitive activities so they can enjoy their work again and focus on what matters to them.

When not at his desk, Richard can be found cycling, swimming and when the opportunity permits, sailing and flying.

Business Process
Automation Consultants

According to Eric Schmidt, former Executive Chairman at Google, there were 5 exabytes* of information created between the dawn of civilisation and 2003. Since then, that volume of data is created every two days.

*Yes, we had to look it up too. An exabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. Five exabytes are described as being ‘all words ever spoken by human beings’.

There’s no doubt that data is here, it’s big, and it has so much value. If we can just keep control of it and use it to our best advantage.

Data solutions like Airtable really help us to achieve this.

Airtable is a versatile platform that combines the simplicity of a spreadsheet with the robust features of a database. It can be put to great use in businesses of all sizes and doesn’t require extensive technical skills to use.

However, like all tools of its type, you need experience to be able to leverage its full capabilities. And that’s where Smarter Business Processes comes in.

We offer specialised Airtable customisation and consultancy services that will help you maximise the platform’s potential, in particular helping you integrate systems with Airtable to create frictionless, efficient workflows. An example of this is the integration of Xero with Airtable for Dan Lewis from Duct-IN.

After working with our experts, Dan said “While Xero is excellent, it has limited functionality for tracking margin information on individual orders and at month-end. To fill this gap, I’ve been manually inputting data into a spreadsheet, which takes up about 15-20% of my time each month. Smarter Business Processes understood my goals and helped me develop a customised Airtable solution tailored to our business needs, allowing us to achieve the required results.”

Let’s explore what Airtable has to offer.

It provides a visually appealing spreadsheet format with an easy to use drag and drop interface
It ensures data integrity and consistency with true relational functionality
It’s powerful enough for complex solutions, such as a CRM, task management, project management and inventory tracking
It brings real-time collaboration into your organisation, enabling teams to work together in a shared online space
It’s customisable so you can really make it work for your business (it also has a great range of ready-made templates if you prefer that)
It can be integrated with other tools such as Slack, Google Drive, and Xero

However, we wouldn’t be living up to our smart business name and reputation if we let things lie at this point. Because we know not everyone is technically minded, and because sometimes that ‘new platform learning curve’ simply takes up too much time, we’re here to help you make the most of Airtable within your business.

Our specialist Airtable consultancy services start with us conducting a comprehensive assessment of your current workflows to identify opportunities for improvement.

Our Airtable consultants can then offer tailored advice to help you implement customised Airtable solutions.

Working with us in this way means you avoid common pitfalls and benefit from a fast-tracked project to integrate Airtable into your systems and processes.

What might this look like?

We’re often asked to help clients integrate Airtable with their in-house and legacy systems so they can have one reporting interface. We can help you build this integration and implement it seamlessly.

And while you might be fine with creating a basic database using Airtable, when it comes to creating something more organised and relational, you can benefit from our experience and knowledge – as they say, you don’t know what you don’t know!

If you’re running a slightly larger and more complex organisation, you might need some project management help. In the past we’ve helped clients who want to integrate departments and functions across the business, including several legacy systems and ensuring one overarching system that can be used by everyone in the business for collaborative working and efficient reporting.

There are few things more worthwhile than streamlining your data and processes to enable everyone to improve their access and ability to use data in decision making.

Having great data is one thing but if you can’t use it to gain insights into trends and predict future outcomes, what use does it really have?

If you’d like to know more about Airtable, or speak to one of our accredited consultants, simply book a free consultation and we’ll be delighted to show you how we can help.