What helps an F1 race car cross the finish line? It's not just a skilled driver, and it's not just a precisely engineered and tested vehicle.
It's a team, the work of thousands of individuals working on hundreds of thousands of projects seamlessly to keep not just that car, but a tonne of complicated projects in motion.
And like building a race car, efforts need to be precise, coordinated, and easy to manage. For McLaren Racing, that's where Smartsheet comes in.
Smartsheet is a cloud-based project management and collaboration tool helping teams manage large, complex projects, track progress, and keep lots of intricate logistical parts moving to help businesses automate their workflows.
Founded in 2005, Smartsheet is used by a variety of industries, including construction, healthcare, finance, and technology, by over 100,000 organisations including the NHS, DeWalt, Domino's and LEGO.
Smartsheet provides a flexible platform allowing teams to collaborate and work together in real-time, no matter where they are and has been invaluable to businesses, especially since the pandemic.
It is designed to be user-friendly, with a range of features that can be customized to meet the needs of each team, project or client, helping it integrate into any company structure.
It's not surprising that such an intuitive and comprehensive project management tool would draw the interest of British automotive expert McLaren, best known for their own marvels of engineering and technology.
The partnership between McLaren Racing and Smartsheet began back in 2021, when McLaren was looking for a way to streamline the release of their 2022 cars, including their Formula 1 contender, the MCL36.
Edward Green, Head of Commercial Technology at McLaren Racing, told us that they had over 800 digital assets that they needed to launch all the cars at once, and Smartsheet's platform, Brandfolder, was the perfect tool for managing these.
This is because Brandfolder acts largely autonomously, tagging and filing images based on logos, faces, and objects it recognises.
Getting assets for something like a car reveal or a PR event used to be a logistical nightmare for McLaren - They told us they used to have over 90TBs of assets on mechanical hard drives in a drawer in McLaren HQ - but now it's easy.
They can search for a brand name to find any images containing its logo, and they can search for "Lando" or "Oscar" to find images of them getting in and out of their car to use for Press Releases. Gone are the days when they'd have to get involved in a huge chain of emails with various people across the company looking for that "perfect" image.
The entire process for the car launches took less than 8 weeks, and once they'd used it for the car launches, they were hooked.
"If I could teach one thing," Edward Green told us, "It'd be curiosity." He said that Smartsheet had helped make the staff more curious, in part because they had more spare time once things were streamlined, and partly because it was such a powerful tool that had the potential to solve problems across the company.
His strategy is fairly simple - if you can help solve a niche problem, you can shout about it across the business. That gets other people interested, and they start wondering if they can solve problems in their department in a similar way, or with similar tools.
It was like a chain reaction, with people implementing Smartsheet here there and everywhere. "Presentations" became "Dashboards", which now have the power to change live files where their previous systems couldn't.
Nowadays, they use Smartsheet for everything. Edward specifically told us that "You cannot run a project without Smartsheet." People suggest things in the office, and they'd be met with the question - "Is it on Smartsheet?"
And it didn't take long to integrate Smartsheet into MacLaren, with them able to be up and running very quickly and there was a large clamour from employees for licenses, which were told is very unusual for McLaren.
Typically, they have to force people to adopt new tech, this time there was a demand. “It spread like wildfire.”
One big result is the faster distribution of race day footage and assets on Social Media and press platforms. For fans this is great - you get access to highlight moments from the races much quicker and in higher quality, and for McLaren and its partners, you get it with enhanced tag and searchability.
Smartsheet is one of those tools that seems like it's mostly just limited by your imagination, and that's something that McLaren definitely has in droves. They use it to hold their info on the "whats" and "where", and use it efficiently to get an overview of what's going on and when so they can make plans.
This is obviously hugely powerful for a company that can be in the USA one week, and Spain the next. On top of that, they have automated systems that do all sorts for them, even down to arranging their kit and racewear.
It automatically emails staff and tells them to come in for a fitting. The kit is then measured out and ordered using Smartsheet, with all measurements and requirements kept digitally on the system. This was something that used to be done using huge sheets of paper, post-its, and email trails.
Someone would measure you up, write down the measurements, and then send an email to a supplier to get the kit arranged. They'd then presumably have to receive it and arrange for you to collect it, and the whole process was significantly less organised and more chaotic than it is now. The menial tasks are automated, freeing up time and energy for the more important jobs.
Efficiency and staff time is something that matters a lot to Edward Green. He told us it changes the skill mix in the company, with staff now finding they're able to go on courses and learn more skills.
The net result for the cars is clear - less time on paperwork and organisation means more hands on deck with the cars, whether it's decoding the data, designing the sidepods, or debriefing after a race.
The people in McLaren could not have made it clearer to us - Smartsheet makes the cars faster. There are 30 people working in IT, and 1200 working elsewhere for McLaren, and all of them have saved copious amounts of time thanks to this partnership.
Save time in the office, it turns out, and you can gain time on the track. Conversations around motorsports are filled with the phrase "marginal gains" - save a tenth here, half a tenth there, and before long you've got a race on your hands.
That's what McLaren uses it for - practically, it's used for managing social channels, IT Tickets, and planning and tracking important logistical problems that can't afford to go wrong, like sending multiple cars around the world for races and events.
Smartsheet helps them knock down walls between various teams and really drives collaboration between departments streamlining processes and helping team members gain their own accountability for their work.
With incredibly scaleable and integrated solutions, Smartsheet is particularly great at growing with its clients - with simple problems requiring solutions that can then be applied to not just other parts of the business now but also to what the business will be doing tomorrow.
And while Smartsheet's powerful software is helping to better connect its partners, it’s not always about the technology. They insist that you need people to talk with each other and share examples of what they’re working on.
"In Smartsheet, you can see the automated workflows so anyone can follow along to understand and see what someone is doing – The visual representation is great. It’s not buried in lines of code. Because we’re a team, we all want to share and help each other."
While software that incorporates all this sounds complicated, surprisingly it isn't. We tried a quick demonstration that took minutes and we were surprised at how intuitive the system was.
A simple form was quickly filled out was then collated with results which could then be organised to focus on specific metrics. Some of the tools built into Smart Sheet looked as easy to use as Trello and Excel which immediately feels more comfortable thanks to the familiarity of the system, and when they zoomed out to show us what you could then do with this information and how to you expand on it, the possibilities were endless.
They showed us a template form that can be automatically sent to review by assigned users like board members or executives for approval, offering consistent and detailed information, which keeps the board and management up to date on the status of projects and once approved can then be sent on to specific teams or company-wide.
This can be as simple or as complicated as the user needs and often forms the basic building blocks of a project - they can even be customised to match a business's branding.
They illustrated how Smartsheet can be used to plan, capture, manage, automate and report on work providing multiple projects visible on a portfolio dashboard providing a detailed overview of everything going on and their progression and their level of completion.
The project Dashboard provides an overview that allows businesses to track projects and keep time and on budget and can be shared with multiple uses. Having seen first-hand how quickly these can be built, sent out and data quickly collated, it's not surprising that a user can create dozens of project forms in an hour, really pushing projects forward and getting valuable information into the hands of those who need it as fast as possible.
The future looks exciting for Smartsheet, with them saying that recent advancements in AI tools compliment the work they are already doing and that they are looking forward to learning more about the technology and the updates to come.
Smartsheet has already helped McLaren achieve new levels of efficiency, allowing them to work smart and faster so they can focus on further developing their incredible race-winning cars.
From managing digital assets, to improving team efficiency and collaboration Smartsheet has become an indispensable tool. It has saved time and empowered the team.
McLaren's success on the track is now supported by the innovative and scalable solutions provided by Smartsheet. they have crossed the finish line together and In the fast-paced world of Formula 1, where every fraction of a second matters, McLaren and Smartsheet's partnership has demonstrated that the right tools and a more cohesive team can make all the difference.
It raises the question - how might motorsports or other areas of the sporting world change as teams and competitors attempt to embed technology into their processes? Are there significant potential gains that we're yet to see?
