Use case: Ticket Management

How Boveda Stayed Agile in Manufacturing and Cut Costs by Syncing Wrike to Jira

Core integrations

Wrike + Jira

Industry

Manufacturing

Location

Minnetonka, Minnesota

Employees

100

Use case

Ticket Management

Trevor Brace

"Unito was the only option that didn't involve a ton of complexity. It was out-of-the-box and setting it up was as simple as clicking to connect fields between Jira and Wrike. We created our workflows, made some adjustments, then just set it and forget it. And it’s worked ever since."

— Trevor Brace , IT Director @ Boveda

Initial challenge: Optimizing scrum teams and sprint-based assignments

When Trevor Brace became IT director at global manufacturing leader Boveda Inc. in 2019, he knew one of his first priorities would be to overhaul the development process his team had been running in Wrike. Although a fantastic tool for project managers with intuitive workflows, a long list of features and task management options, it wasn’t what Trevor needed at the moment. Instead, he wanted scrum teams in Jira to facilitate dev work and sprint-based assignments.

After all, Jira was designed with software teams in mind. It’s the perfect tool for developers to handle issue tracking, time tracking, and reporting. The only problem then became how to extend visibility between teams in separate tools. Boveda is a global manufacturing leader in its category, which means being in an environment with a lot of moving parts, so maintaining visibility between Wrike and Jira assignments was a high priority.

“Wrike doesn’t do a great job of agile work; it’s much harder to create sprints and get reporting out of there. I’d been working in Jira for many years and it’s relatively inexpensive, so it was an easy call for us. But since we already had all of our users in Wrike, I didn’t want to double the number of seats in a second tool. So instead we created a smaller team of 10 people only in Jira. but then we needed to have visibility.”

– Trevor Brace, IT Director, Boveda

Solution: Integrating support tickets between Wrike and Jira with Unito for enhanced efficiency

Trevor wanted to have two systems operating side-by-side between two teams with common tickets synced together as needed. The key was to develop a work methodology that made sense for the manufacturing industry, but didn’t add redundant processes or seats in Wrike or Jira. So they turned to automation platforms to figure out the best integration for their needs.

Boveda uses a tool called Celigo to integrate their ERP and Ecommerce software. Trevor considered using it to integrate tickets between Jira and Wrike, but there were time and security concerns. Doing so would mean exposing their API and writing lines of code for each individual rule and field mapping. 

“With Celigo, we would have to write all the code and then there’s a ton of work to maintain it. Whereas with Unito, it was as simple as clicking to connect fields between Jira and Wrike. There was no debate at that point. We created our Unito workflows, tweaked them a little bit, made some small adjustments, but largely we haven’t had to do much other than just set it and forget it. And it’s worked ever since.”

– Trevor Brace, IT Director, Boveda

“Now anyone in the company can get IT support within Wrike, since it goes into Jira through Unito. So it keeps that visibility between people in Jira and the folks in Wrike who only need access to their tickets. It also limits who has access to Jira just to keep the costs down. Plus we can collaborate with other teams, like finance, and it’s just been really nice.”

– Daisy Hibbard, Agile Coach, Boveda Inc.

Results: 30+ hours and $2,800 USD saved per week

  • The Boveda team synced Wrike tasks with Jira issues, so tasks can be shared as tickets in real-time between tools.
  • With 10 Jira seats and 50+ Wrike seats, Boveda saves thousands in license fees alone by not having duplicate seats. 
  • Anyone can now submit requests for IT development support in Wrike, which is received by the team in Jira automatically. 
  • Developers can then share updates from their internal Jira issues as they make progress. Both sides can collaborate without having to switch tabs or tools.
  • The team built a dashboard for finance to share IT requests through a single custom field in their Unito flow.
  • Unito’s internal estimates of this customer’s usage assumes 30+ hours and $2,800 USD saved per week.

“As a user, if I’m in Jira, I can see comments from Wrike, say if someone from finance left a comment on an active task the team is working on. It’s just nice to be able to collaborate that way and be able to see that active collaboration going on.”

– Daisy Hibbard, Agile Coach, Boveda Inc.

“Unito was the only one that didn’t involve a ton of complexity. We’re an IT team and we can certainly tweak things and make them work. But this was an out-of-the-box solution and setting it up was pretty simple.” 

– Trevor Brace, IT Director, Boveda

What can Unito do for your manufacturing business?

If you’d like to set up a ticketing triage system in the manufacturing industry, start with this guide to sync Wrike with Jira. Unito is the perfect platform for setting up a two-way integration between tools. There’s something for everyone from project managers to developers, sales to marketing, finance and operations, or anything in between.

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About Boveda

Boveda Inc. is the global leader in 2-way humidity control for a multitude of industries and applications. Their patented products allow companies and end-users to preserve moisture-sensitive products over extended periods of time with zero maintenance. Various Boveda RH (relative humidity) levels are used in-market for premium tobacco, musical instruments, medical devices, food, electronics and herbal medicine.