[Community Member Spotlight] Mike Fank ✨

Hi everyone 👋

Today, we're thrilled to celebrate Mike Fank, our newest Black Belt holder. If you've spent time here, you've likely engaged with Mike in thoughtful discussions, explored various use cases, or received helpful advice from him. We want to extend a heartfelt thank you to Mike for his invaluable contributions to our Community. We invite you to join us in expressing your gratitude in the comments below 🤗

Now, let’s get to know Mike a bit better 🙂

Tell us a little about your role and industry.

I work as the Operational Excellence, Quality, and Safety Manager at Wisconsin Metal Parts. We are a contract manufacturer in Wisconsin, and we make everything. We have parts in bike racks, medical devices, building HVAC systems, Orthodontics, material handling and packaging, food service, and defense contracts. If it’s made of metal, we’ll gladly work on it. We like challenges.

My responsibilities are (very generically) to drive continual improvement and ensure compliance to customer requirements, process requirements, and regulatory requirements.

Why do you/your team use Wrike?

I was looking for a better way to manage projects. What made Wrike stand out was the robust request forms and approval process. We needed to automate the approval process when projects were submitted and Wrike did that well.

However, now that we got into Wrike, the number of processes we can automate continues to grow. We’re a little over 12 months into our journey, and we’ve already migrated Employee Suggestions, Maintenance Ideas, Corrective Actions, Customer Surveys, Management Review, APQP, and goal setting.

What were you doing before Wrike?

Excel, email, and my memory. It was painful to try to remember all the little bits and pieces, and then ask for updates via email.

What is the top thing that makes you productive?

Request forms and automations. I love building stuff that manages itself.

What process/setup that you do in Wrike are you most proud of? 

My favorite right now is our APQP process. This is a large, 4-phased process with approvals at each phase. Other companies will have entire workbooks for 1 project and separate workbooks to manage the status of projects. Usually there are weekly update meetings and it’s all cumbersome and time consuming. Getting this into Wrike means we can automate a lot of the system. Status updates are live via dashboards. Notifications of completed work are automatic. Records are all saved in 1 spot. We are going to save a bunch of time and money, and the process will get more accurate and more efficient.

If someone was thinking about using Wrike what would you say?

Why are you still thinking about it? Just do it.

What value do you get out of the Community?

The people here are super helpful to resolve both simple and complex questions. The How-to forum is awesome for getting advice to start new things or make things better. I love the weekly release notes to stay up to date on what the Wrike team is developing.

Fun question: If you had to be a Wrike feature which would you be and why? (Ex. @mentions, Gantt Chart, search, etc).

The new dashboards. Because I like showing the whole project status as that’s key to understanding the minutia. Also, keeping track of projects and displaying metrics is a solid chunk of operational excellence.

Feel free to connect with Mike on LinkedIn or Instagram @UpsideDownExcellence 📣

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover