Region
EMEA
Industry
Professional Services & Consulting
Use case
Customer Visibility, Onboarding, Project Management
Before
After
Dreher Consulting is a Germany based consulting firm that partners with enterprises to modernize their operations through ERP advisory, process optimization, and digital transformation initiatives. As a vendor independent advisor, the company works closely with clients to evaluate, implement, and optimize the right systems, ensuring that technology decisions are aligned with long term business outcomes.
Andrew Thompson, is one of the firm's core operational leads and a key user of the tools the business relies on day to day. In his role, Andrew oversees project delivery, managing consultant time allocation, keeping clients informed of progress, and ensuring that the right people are deployed to the right projects at the right time.
Before Rocketlane, Dreher Consulting was running its project operations through a combination of spreadsheet based project management tools, manual note taking, and a high volume of phone calls and in person meetings. While the firm had never been without some form of project management software, Andrew noted that tooling had been in place for over twenty years, the reality on the ground was far messier than any software dashboard could suggest.
Dreher Consulting had long relied on standardised project management templates built in spreadsheets. In theory, these templates gave structure to project delivery. In practice, they became a bottleneck. Every update had to be manually entered into the template, and every time a project status needed to be communicated, whether to internal stakeholders or to clients, information had to be manually extracted from the same spreadsheet. There was no automated path from project data to stakeholder communication; every touchpoint required a fresh act of copying, reformatting, and re-entering the same information.
“Majority of project management tools, in theory it should be a very simple thing to be able to deliver. In practice, it’s very difficult to get a project management tool that just focuses on the project. Usually, there’s lots of fancy bells and whistles and you use none of them. And you still get back to the basic spreadsheet.”
Client communication was heavily relationship driven and almost entirely synchronous. Updates were delivered in steering committee meetings held fortnightly or monthly, and any information shared was only as current as the last person who had bothered to update their section of the project tracker. The downstream impact was a steady stream of inbound client calls seeking basic status updates that should have been self serve. These calls consumed consultant time and put delivery teams perpetually on the back foot, managing client anxiety rather than project progress.
One of the most operationally damaging limitations of Dreher Consulting’s previous tooling was its inability to support meaningful forward planning for consultant capacity. Most tools provided some visibility into workloads over the next week or two, but planning out resource allocation over the next month or six months was effectively impossible. For a professional services firm whose financial health depends on keeping consultants productively deployed, this was a critical gap. Andrew described the experience of discovering mid project that a consultant’s time had already been committed elsewhere as a significant operational hazard, one that required time consuming backtracking and renegotiation that no team should have to absorb.
The same piece of project information was recorded in an internal project tool, then manually transcribed into a separate update document, and then copied again into an email to the client. For a single update, this process consumed between thirty to forty minutes of a consultant’s time, not because the information was complex, but because the tools required it to be re entered at every step. With a team of fifteen to twenty consultants all operating the same way across multiple concurrent projects, the aggregate waste was substantial.
“Duplication of information was the trigger. In one tool, we’re writing this down. And for this exact same point, we had to write it down in another tool. And then we wanted to give an update to the customer, so we copied and pasted from that tool into another tool. And then we send an email saying the same information. The team spent probably thirty, forty minutes just to deliver one piece of information.”
In the absence of a platform that clients could access directly, Dreher Consulting’s entire client engagement model was built around meetings- many of them, and often. Before COVID, these were frequently in person. Even as the firm adapted to remote collaboration, the fundamental dynamic remained: clients could only learn about project status by asking. The project team, meanwhile, was focused primarily on moving through internal stage gates and ticking off template checkboxes, rather than proactively surfacing progress to the people paying for it. This reactive, meeting-heavy model created friction on both sides. Clients felt dependent on the consultants for basic information.
By the time the firm began its most recent evaluation, they had already been through an extensive and somewhat exhausting history of trying and discarding project management software.
Andrew described a pattern that had become almost seasonal:
This history made the entire consulting team, Andrew included, deeply sceptical that any new tool would be meaningfully different.
Rocketlane first appeared on Dreher Consulting’s radar approximately eighteen months before the firm ultimately adopted it.
Once Rocketlane was implemented, the shift in Dreher’s delivery operations was dramatic. The entire project lifecycle became smoother and more predictable. Within days of going live, even the most skeptical team members were won over by the new efficiency. Previously tedious tasks like importing historical time entries and setting up project milestones simply took care of themselves. Instead of fighting spreadsheets, Dreher’s consultants could focus on their work from day one in the new system.
One of the most immediate and visible impacts of Rocketlane’s implementation was a dramatic reduction in the volume of inbound client calls seeking basic project status updates. This shift was noticeable within the first few weeks, as clients began logging in to the platform and finding the answers to their questions without needing to reach out to the delivery team. Consultants are no longer fielding calls about things the client could easily find out for themselves, freeing up time and reducing the ambient stress of managing client expectations reactively.
“Since Rocketlane, I would say such conversations have been cut down by two thirds. A large percentage of calls asking quite basic questions have been removed. That was very noticeable from the first few weeks.”
Rocketlane’s resource management module gave the broader leadership team a clear, granular view of every consultant’s current and upcoming commitments. The granularity of the platform helped them drill down to the level of individual consultant hours across multiple concurrent projects, making it possible to build what Andrew called “the jigsaw puzzle” of consistent client delivery. They were able to save between two and three hours per week on resource management alone, more during busier periods when multiple projects are onboarding or offboarding simultaneously.
“Rocketlane’s granularity is a huge advantage. You can quite easily see what a consultant has at any one time .Has a consultant got some available time? We need cover in projects. How are we gonna do that? It’s a lot easier to build the jigsaw puzzle of who has availability and when allowing a consistent delivery to clients.”
Rocketlane’s impact extended beyond project management and into the finance function, where the accurate and granular tracking of consultant hours has simplified the end of month billing process considerably. Previously, the need to reconcile time entries before invoicing created a bottleneck that meant invoices had to be submitted well ahead of the month’s end to avoid payment delays. With Rocketlane, the process of identifying and resolving time entry errors has become straightforward, making it easy to trace discrepancies back to the specific week and task where they occurred.
The transition from Dreher Consulting’s previous platform, Teamworks, to Rocketlane involved the migration of over fifteen active projects, including historical time entries, project structures, and templates. The transition was smooth and the demonstration of the kind of responsive, no nonsense support won the team’s confidence.
The feedback from consultants evolved quickly from reluctant tolerance to genuine appreciation. Meetings that previously consumed significant time explaining project status to clients began to run more efficiently because clients arrived prepared. The user experience was clean enough that even those who were initially resistant found themselves able to navigate the platform without extensive training.
“Due to the simplicity of the tool, and the high level of support available from Rocket Lane as standard that’s an area where a lot of project management software falls down.They promise the world and deliver nothing. The support from Rocketlane was very, very good.”
Rocketlane has become embedded in the daily rhythms of Dreher Consulting’s delivery operations in a way that no previous PSA tool managed to achieve. Rather than being consulted periodically or used as a passive record keeping system, the platform is open and active throughout the working day for key members of the team.
Consultants log time against specific clients and tasks in a matter of seconds: project, task, done. Andrew keeps Rocketlane open on his desktop continuously, making time capture an incidental action rather than a deliberate administrative exercise. The downstream impact on billing accuracy, as noted by the finance team, has been significant.
With resource planning, they are able to rapidly assess consultant availability and produce templates outlining which consultants were available, how many hours each could commit to the project, and how those hours mapped to the tasks in question. This kind of forward visibility helps them make confident capacity commitments to clients.
Dreher Consulting has invested meaningfully in building out project templates within Rocketlane, with Andrew’s colleague Leo taking the lead on template development. These templates provide a consistent structural foundation for each engagement type, allowing consultants to begin new projects with a pre configured set of tasks, milestones, and checkpoints rather than building from scratch each time.
The client facing dimension of Rocketlane is where the platform’s impact on Dreher Consulting’s relationships has been most visible. Clients who choose to engage directly with the portal are arriving at project meetings already informed they have reviewed the latest status, identified the areas they want to discuss, and come prepared with specific questions rather than general enquiries.
“If you don’t have to spend the first twenty minutes explaining who everybody is and what they’re doing and where we are, you’ve already saved a third of your meeting. You can get into the actual pertinent information faster and more accurately. And let’s be honest, nobody likes a meeting that drags on longer than necessary.”
As Dreher Consulting continues to grow its client base and expand the complexity of the engagements it delivers, Rocketlane will remain at the centre of its operational infrastructure, not as a tool that was adopted and tolerated, but as one that has genuinely become part of how the firm delivers value to its clients every day.
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Professional Services & Consulting
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