How ASSP Went From Spreadsheet Overload to Strategic Clarity
“We moved from a very manual process to a platform that helps the team stay focused on our strategy with increased visibility across all of our operational areas.”
- Janet Byrne, Senior Manager of Product Marketing
The American Society of Safety Professionals (ASSP) advances environmental health and safety worldwide, serving a community of more than 35,000 safety professionals.
With roughly 75 employees executing an ambitious five-year strategic plan, ASSP is focused on strengthening its member community, addressing emerging risks, and developing the next generation of safety leaders.
The strategy carries real stakes: mission impact, member trust, and financial targets all depend on the organization’s ability to keep priorities clear, progress measurable, and leadership aligned.
For Janet Byrne, who helps lead ASSP’s strategic planning and reporting efforts, the work wasn’t just setting priorities. It was making sure those priorities stayed clear, measurable, and visible enough for leadership and the board to act on them.
Before Elate, ASSP managed strategy in a spreadsheet; one that was technically “shared,” but functionally fragile.
The symptoms were familiar to any team trying to execute a multi-year plan with manual tools:
As Janet put it: "We had an unwiedly Excel document, and it took a lot of effort just to keep it current."
When leadership or board reporting was due, there was manual work to track down updates, rewrite status language to make it concise, and turn input into board-ready PDFs.
The work was high-effort and high-risk: if a link broke, a version was outdated, or an update came in late, the whole story of progress could unravel. The strategy wasn't just hard to manage, it was hard to trust.
ASSP wasn’t looking for more data. They needed a system that made their plan operational:
ASSP needed something structured enough to run strategy, but simple enough to stick. Elate gave the ASSP team a way to make the plan operational and make visibility a shared responsibility.
Just as importantly: it needed to be practical for a lean team. The goal wasn’t to introduce a heavy process, it was to create a structure that reduced process management time while increasing accountability.
Elate gave ASSP a way to move the plan out of a spreadsheet and into a living system.
Instead of constantly interpreting and repackaging updates, Elate made the plan itself the foundation: Objectives connected to measures, ownership made explicit, and progress easy to see without rebuilding the story each time.
For ASSP, the why was simple: fewer manual cycles, clearer accountability, and reporting that leadership could use to impact the organization.
During implementation, Janet and the Elate team worked together to simplify KPIs - including tightening language, reducing ambiguity, and aligning stakeholders on what they were actually measuring.
Because the hard part of strategy execution isn’t entering objectives into a system. It’s making sure everyone is measuring the same thing in the same way, so progress isn’t up for interpretation.
Early on, our partnership was focused on a few fundamentals: what “progress” actually means for each Objective, how it would be measured consistently, and who owned the update cadence in a way that was realistic for a lean team.
Once that foundation was in place, the operating rhythm got easier to sustain. Updates became part of normal operations rather than a last-minute scramble. And the plan stopped bottlenecking with Janet. Leaders across departments began maintaining their own progress, and stakeholders stayed aligned around the organization’s top priorities without needing someone to translate every cycle.
Over time, the administrative weight lifted. “We migrated from a manual process,” said Janet, “to a platform that really is able to help the team focus on what’s important.”
Today, ASSP’s strategy, KPIs, and reporting live in one centralized platform. Automated notifications and structured cadences ensure updates happen consistently—without Janet having to chase them down.
“It’s night and day,” Janet said of the difference. “We’re not rebuilding reporting from scratch every time leadership needs an update.”
Instead of a scramble ahead of leadership meetings, updates have become part of the normal operating rhythm. And when something hasn’t been updated, it’s visible enough to address without it becoming a fire drill.
That small shift has a big impact. When updates happen in a predictable cadence, leadership conversations change from, “where are we on this?” to “what does this mean, and what decisions do we need to make?”
For ASSP, board reporting used to mean rebuilding the narrative by hand. Tracking down updates, rewriting status language, and stitching together something the board could follow.
Because the work is captured in a consistent structure throughout the quarter, reporting is repeatable. Janet exports Elate reports as pre-reads, and the board conversation starts with shared context.
“The week before a board meeting used to be a scramble,” Janet said. “Now it’s a quick export and a better conversation.”
That shift changes the live meeting. Less time walking through what’s in the plan. More time on what it means: what’s on track, what’s drifting, and where leadership needs to make a decision.
In manual systems, risk tends to surface at the worst possible time: when it’s already visible to everyone and harder to fix.
As a beta user of Elate’s Strategy Advisor, Janet used Risk Navigator summaries ahead of meetings to spot pacing issues and inconsistencies across Objectives early enough to act. That gave her a head start: clarify targets, pressure-test statuses, and align with team leads earlier while there was still time to course-correct.
The result is fewer surprises, more honest visibility, and a strategy cadence that stays actionable instead of reactive.
“A year ago,” Janet said, “we’d be slogging through a spreadsheet trying to translate it into something leadership could use.”
ASSP now operates with far greater alignment, ownership, and visibility than ever before:
What once required manual analysis and constant rewriting is now automatically and consistently translated into leadership-ready visibility. This has freed ASSP to focus on advancing strategy rather than managing the mechanics behind it.
Almost two years into their partnership with Elate, ASSP continues to deepen how they run strategy. What began as a practical fix for an unruly spreadsheet has evolved into a more resilient operating model: clearer priorities, stronger accountability, and earlier insight into risk — supporting ASSP’s mission with a plan the organization can actually execute.
The American Society of Safety Professionals (ASSP) is a global association focused on advancing environmental health and safety. ASSP supports a community of more than 35,000 safety professionals with education, standards, advocacy, and resources to help protect people and improve workplace safety worldwide.
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