ILC Dover case study

How Manufacturing Firm ILC Dover Integrates Hive In Its Remote Work Strategy

ILC Dover is an American special engineering development and manufacturing company specializing in the creation of high-performance flexible materials, serving the aerospace, personal protection, and pharmaceutical industries. Their team is made up of sales representatives from all over the world and engineering resources at various facilities. ILC Dover’s commercial product team is made up of about 15 engineers, who focus on continuous improvement in a rapidly growing pharmaceutical and bio pharmaceutical businesses.

The Challenge

Before finding Hive, ILC Dover’s commercial product team was managing all materials, designs, product requests, and customer requests via email and an Excel spreadsheet. Using an Excel spreadsheet worked when they were a smaller organization, but because they’ve scaled so much, it didn’t make sense to list out all tasks in one document. It was a job in and of itself keeping track of who was doing what in a spreadsheet, and only one person could take notes in a cell at a time, which really limited collaborative efforts.

The Solution

When the ILC Dover team started looking for a tool to help organize tasks and processes, they knew that because they were a very email driven culture, they needed a tool that could work hand-in-hand with Outlook. That’s where Hive came in. The two main benefits they identified with Hive were first, connection to email, and second, the ability to utilize subtask templates.

Hive has made processes and communication seamless and we truly wouldn’t be able to work the same without it. – Adam Sadkowski

Hive Mail is one of the team’s most used features — a favorite because they can respond to emails from the app itself, and even attach full email chains to action cards. The team is easily able to see updated email chains in the tasks, and since implementing Hive, email usage has dropped substantially and they are more organized than ever.

The second key aspect of Hive ILC Dover loves is the ability to create action templates. Their team has very standard and repeatable processes that they need to apply every time an item comes in, and Hive allows them to apply templates to streamline actions and subtasks. Hive is the only app they found that could do this.

With the action card templates, when a new action is created, there are subtasks automatically applied to each item, which helps streamline processes and keep things moving smoothly. Once the template is applied, the action then starts going through the different subtasks, which are things like “Internal Design Work” or “Customer Approval.”

Over the last few months, ILC Dover’s use of Hive has skyrocketed — they started with about 30 employees using Hive, and now the organization is at about 100. Hive has also been absolutely integral in their remote work strategy in the wake of the recent global health crisis.