From spreadsheets to real-time insights: How Rancho Biosciences avoids project cost overruns

Rancho Biosciences is a global scientific data company supporting pharma, biotech, foundations, and governmental organizations with end-to-end expertise across data consulting, data engineering, curation, bioinformatics, and data science. Their team of PhD and PhD MD scientists works across single-cell, spatial, genomics, imaging, clinical, and multi-modal datasets with scientific rigor. Rancho also provides AI-ready biomedical data products and leads collaborative consortia that deliver harmonized, analysis-ready datasets for research and AI development.

Given the scale of their team and projects, staying on top of project budgets and timelines is critical. Since 2016, they've relied on Beebole's project time tracking and budget management capabilities to replace spreadsheets, prevent cost overruns, and improve decision-making.

#The challenge of scaling project budgets and oversight

As Senior Project Management Team Lead, Brad Farrell oversees a large portfolio of over one hundred ongoing projects, while managing his own assignments and communicating nuanced project updates to senior leadership.

Before Beebole, Rancho Biosciences' project tracking relied heavily on spreadsheets and a combination of tools like Excel, Microsoft Project, and Jira. While these tools helped manage deliverables, they lacked the integrated view needed for monitoring hours against budgets in real time. With so many projects running in parallel, it was challenging to identify problems early, and potential budget overruns were often detected too late to take corrective action.

The growing complexity of Rancho Biosciences' operations required a system that could:

• Track hours worked against set budgets with precision

• Provide instant status updates for 100+ active projects

• Show actionable alerts before budgets are exceeded

• Integrate with financial processes for more accurate invoicing

• Give leadership the detailed and nuanced insights they need for strategic decisions

#Real-time control and visibility across all your active projects

Beebole quickly became Rancho Biosciences' central hub for tracking project hours, budgets, and project health. Brad Farrell now has a clear, bird's-eye view of all ongoing projects and subprojects, including costs, rates, and hours worked. This visibility makes it easier to identify issues early and keep projects on track.

Farrell says Beebole is a place he can go to see exactly what hours have been worked against the total budget, as well as project status.

Furthermore, Rancho Biosciences' project budgets are set in hours, making it easy to translate a purchase order into an hour-based amount with Beebole. "Every purchase order is translated into a Beebole project where we can track hours used against total budget, and that's also where our accounting department pulls data from to invoice," says Farrell. "It does a lot of things really nicely."

#Turning project data into actionable intelligence with Beebole's API

Farrell noted that Beebole is great for project managers looking for answers to quick questions at a glance. For deeper insights, he uses Beebole's open API to feed time tracking data into Rancho Biosciences' internal program using Python scripts. The internal dashboard uses data on projects, subprojects, costs, rates, and budgets to create burndown reports. Reports are updated in real-time to provide insights into the completed and remaining work for any given project.

Farrell says that thanks to Beebole's wealth of primary data and robust API, their reports clearly indicate whether projects will finish on time and within budget, and if work is being done consistently or sporadically.

Apart from internal reporting, Beebole's data is also used for invoicing, in conjunction with other financials-focused systems in place at Rancho Biosciences. Cross-referencing invoices with time tracking data helps keep budgets accurate.

#Preventing overruns with budget status indicators

This comprehensive reporting, combined with the budget alerts in Beebole, is key to Rancho Biosciences' project management. When a project or subproject reaches 80% of its budget in Beebole, the budget status changes to yellow. If it turns red, you know that you have exceeded the project budget. These at-a-glance indicators are a clear sign to Brad and his team when they need to take a closer look and adopt remedial measures to accelerate a project or reallocate resources.

#Helping Rancho Biosciences focus on its mission

In the big picture, it is now easier for senior leadership at Rancho Biosciences to pinpoint what's in their control to advance projects and what's not. This leads to strategic discussions on the exact levers they can pull to speed up projects or find ways to maximize output.

"Beebole allows us an easy way to maximize value and make sure we're doing our jobs," Farrell said.

Rancho Biosciences is making significant contributions to scientific data transformation, biomedical AI, and research acceleration, and continues to work towards its mission of saving lives through data-driven solutions. Beebole supports the operational discipline needed to deliver this work reliably at scale.