L-up – excellent consultancy service for researchers

In 2001, L-up began its business consultancy service for researchers and industries. In time, L-up was able to expand its services into bigger fields, such as economy, energy, digital economy, finance, health, security, and much more. L-up works with internationally recognized research institutions and innovative SMEs designing collaborative European research projects. Project teams benefit from L-up’s collaboration and expertise throughout the project life cycle – inception, implementation, and delivery.

Project management comes with many challenges. The greatest being how to share sensitive information online in a secure environment. Different levels of access rights to the work plan, budget, and collaborative documents, combined with the need to create ever growing shared agendas and mailing lists meant that L-up could not use common solutions like Google Drive, Dropbox, or Sharepoint.

EMDESK – the secure and straightforward solution

EMDESK was able to provide a secure and straightforward solution, allowing L-up to complete almost 50 successful proposals and projects in a secure environment. In addition to increased security, working with EMDESK proved to have many other benefits. The contact management and document repository provided by EMDESK proved to be indispensable in completing daily tasks, and an overall increase in accuracy resulted in a 15 percent increase of time saved.

Using EMDESK allowed L-up to quickly expand their portfolio of completed projects, leading to an increased demand for new project consultancy.

While the approach it takes depends upon the type of project, L-up develops action plans that are able to identify and overcome potential roadblocks, provide progress indicators and monitors, identify new partners, prepare proposals, propose the content of the Consortium Agreement, and set up tasks. In order to complete these tasks in a secure, accurate, and efficient manner, L-up relies on the services of EMDESK.

Improved communication with organized and accessible contacts and mailing lists, the elimination of email attachments and insecure documents, the possibility to create public links for external project members and the public, the ability to add specific functions and customized tools, and a powerful and customizable tool for H2020 projects, has allowed L-up to handle large projects with ease. The project collaboration tool, training for self-sufficiency, and support from EMDESK allows L-up to concentrate on providing the best consultancy service possible.

Challenges

  • Securely sharing information online.
  • Varying levels of access to an online repository.
  • Sharing agendas and mailing lists at both project and sub-group levels.
  • Establishing a collaborative online platform for the work plan, budget, and reporting.
  • Customizable presentations of full or limited project statistics.

Solution

  • Eliminating the use of Google Drive and Dropbox.
  • Migrating to EMDESK to enable customization.
  • Creating and customizing specific tools to match the needs of each project.

Results

  • Easy maintenance of contact and mailing lists.
  • Elimination of email attachments.
  • Secure sharing with the introduction of a link to documents with full control over access rights.
  • Optional and secure public links that allow access only to the linked information.
  • Management and time optimization allowing on an overall time savings of 15 percent.
  • The ability to accommodate larger projects.
  • Possibility of adding customer-specific functionalities.