# Asana Case Study – Exporo

> Exporo is Germany's market leader for digital real estate investments. Learn how teams at Exporo use Asana.

Source: https://asana.com/case-study/exporo

## Exporo: A good investment from the start thanks to Asana

With its founding in 2014, Exporo created a platform for digital real estate investments, thereby opening up the opportunity for private investors to benefit from real estate investments starting from small amounts – both with short-term project developments and with long-term portfolio investments. In particular, the use of blockchain technology at Exporo has ushered in a paradigm shift for the digitization of real estate investments. This means that investors can already subscribe to digital securities or trade on the secondary market today. It is technically possible to invest in individual real estate projects starting from just one euro and thus build a professional and diversified real estate portfolio according to one's own wishes, free of charge.

Outcomes

#### 100% penetration

#### Efficient mapping

#### Continuous integration

#### BI integration

- [Back to customer stories](/customers)

Europe

- [Creative production](/workflows/creative-production)

- [IT requests](/templates/for/it/it-requests)

Financial services

Mid-market

- [Rules](/features/workflow-automation/rules)

- [Project views](/features/project-management/project-views)

- [Reporting dashboards](/features/goals-reporting/reporting-dashboards)

## Asana has been in use since the company's founding

Right from the start, Exporo relied on a digital business model and digital collaboration – and also on Asana. This enables the company, headquartered in Hamburg's HafenCity, to respond quickly and agilely to market demands, as projects and content are efficiently mapped cross-functionally via digital processes. Björn Maronde, Data Protection Coordinator at Exporo and responsible for IT administration and information security, was a self-employed IT consultant for 12 years before joining Exporo as a permanent employee. He was already involved in laying a successful foundation during the startup phase. Since he was already familiar with Asana from before, it was a decisive factor for him to integrate Asana as a work management tool into Exporo's business processes from the very beginning. From the outset, the goal was to establish a system that would enable cross-functional work in teams, serve as a central hub for project work, and allow goals and tasks to be recorded at the team and employee levels. Asana's digital and streamlined tools were perfectly suited for Exporo's automated business processes. It turned out that Asana has a lot more to offer than just project management.

## 100% adoption – all employees use Asana

Since the company was founded, the Asana system landscape has formed the basis for structured coordination of business operations. Asana is used company wide in all departments. Each of Exporo's 181 employees has an account in Asana to use for team activities or personal tasks. In addition, external employees and partners, such as the tax consultant or the data protection officer, can also be invited. Because Asana has been in use at Exporo from the very beginning, there are no issues such as "transitioning to new work methods" or "integrating Asana processes into the departments." Nevertheless, continuous training of employees is necessary, especially for new features. This is the only way for employees to fully leverage all the benefits of the platform and, for example, access all relevant information and tasks.

A tool like Asana supports collaboration best when as many colleagues as possible work together with it – and at Exporo, we work 100% with Asana.

## Seamless transition to working from home

The increasingly frequent switch to remote work also went smoothly at Exporo. Thanks to Asana, there have been no significant disruptions to business operations. For example, departments such as HR, Marketing, Tech/Developers, and Contract are particularly dependent on the tool in their daily business. The Contract department, which is responsible for contracts for project developers and investors, must first create legally sound contracts and then manage them, for example, to counteract payment defaults. Currently, processes are being optimized in Asana to, for example, reduce paperwork, gain a clear overview of the status of each project, and further improve team coordination. This is intended to ensure that every employee is informed about their own tasks and deadlines. From the search for suitable projects to funding by investors, the work management tool provides support with tasks, subclasses, and responsibilities. Every single step can be conveniently and easily tracked in detail.

The technology behind Asana has been steadily improving. Today, it can handle much more complex tasks and topics. Nevertheless, it remains easy for users to operate.

## Increased productivity from the start

Because Exporo has relied on Asana as a work management tool since the company was founded, there was a solid, centralized foundation for project management with enormous expansion options for the future. With Asana's continuous advancements, Exporo can tackle new challenges, stay flexible, and find fast, solid solutions. For example, Exporo is currently benefiting from the integration of Asana with the Slack messenger service, which the company mainly uses for internal communication. Here, tasks can now be easily integrated into group chats or direct messages and tracked with a single click.

Björn Maronde has known Asana for many years and has witnessed the tool's rapid development. “In the past, Asana was a very simple tool for business tasks. Back then, it worked in a very linear way, similar to a shopping list. Other tools, on the other hand, were extremely technical and more complicated to use. You first had to create databases in order to build forms and insert data." He is convinced of the tool's constant evolution.

## Asana's evolution and brilliant support

Since switching to the Business version of Asana a year ago, Exporo has had its own contact person on the Customer Success team, which has provided a further boost in efficiency. Maronde is in contact with Asana at least once a month. The personal contact at Asana now knows Exporo's business processes very well and proactively makes relevant suggestions for new features. “You are actively taken along,” says Maronde. He then immediately checks internally whether and how these new features can be used meaningfully and profitably at Exporo. Conversely, the support team provides the greatest possible assistance with requests. Training sessions conducted by Asana are very popular with employees. The experts at Asana are extremely knowledgeable and are very good at sharing their knowledge. The use of the tool and the existing processes that were already being carried out in it have been greatly intensified through the integration of new versions and the training. Even though Exporo has integrated the use of Asana into its workflows very independently, Björn Maronde still recommends regular contact with the experts on Asana's Customer Success team.

You get helpful tips and can make using it even better and easier. I have rarely received such good support from customer support as I have from Asana.

## Asana as a sure-fire success at Exporo

Exporo employees independently consider how they can further integrate individual components of the tool into their day-to-day work and their department. Departments such as HR or Compliance, for example, use the “Forms” function to receive and process requests. Employees plan, organize, and restructure their own daily work on their own. To do this, they actively engage with the system. Maronde: “A colleague who had set a goal for an entire quarter was able to achieve it at the beginning of the quarter with Asana's support. Exporo relies on employees actively getting involved to optimize processes. That's what makes a young company special. It's fun because everyone is rowing in the same direction.”

## Asana Forms and Goals

With the new Asana features Forms and Goals, Exporo is purposefully centralizing specific processes. Forms makes it possible to send just a link to employees – the form stored in Asana then contains all the questions and topics that are relevant to the process. The Goals feature allows you to connect entire company goals to the required tasks and monitor progress. This allows teams to collaborate in a more targeted manner. With Goals, it is possible to link goals directly to tasks without an intermediate step. As a result, Goals provides clarity about tasks, processes, goals, and outcomes.

## A solid data foundation is extremely important for business intelligence

For systematic company analysis, Asana was integrated directly into Exporo's business intelligence (BI). Asana is deeply integrated, and all relevant data is stored in the data warehouse. This allows complex calculations to be performed, such as probabilities for certain events. Consistent reports are not only used for internal purposes but also for reporting to investors. By integrating BI, it is possible to analyze where problems are occurring. When it comes to support tickets, for example, colleagues can see at a glance how many tickets are in progress or still open and how long it took on average to process a ticket. In this way, a lot of additional data is regularly transferred from Asana to the BI tool via an interface. This gives management a concrete overview of all processes.

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