Bandwidth

The team at Bandwidth had been relying on Visio for their diagramming needs for years, but it was missing the mark—they were tired of trying to work with a platform that simply wasn’t meeting their needs. As Bandwidth started searching for a Visio replacement, the company had three main must-haves: cross-platform capabilities, real-time collaboration, and a lower cost. Their search led them to Lucidchart, a visual workspace that checked all these boxes—and then some. Bandwidth made the switch from Visio to Lucidchart four years ago and has been relying on Lucidchart for internal documentation purposes ever since.

Cross-platform capability

Bandwidth is split between Mac and PC users—which meant half the company was out of a diagramming solution when the team relied on Visio. Switching to Lucidchart eliminated this problem since the platform works on any operating system, browser, or device. Now all employees easily have access to the diagramming solution anytime, anywhere.

Rolling out Lucidchart to all these users was simple since Bandwidth used Lucidchart’s integration with Okta to implement single sign-on. In addition, admins no longer have to worry about installing software on every machine since Lucidchart is in the cloud.

Internal documentation

Employees use Lucidchart to build workflows, software architecture, and network diagrams. These visuals help align the organization and ensure proper documentation is in place and accessible. Bandwidth maps out internal processes in Lucidchart so that employees can easily reference them at any time. For example, they use workflows to visualize how any one of the hundreds of SaaS applications the company uses works. They map out their business processes in Lucidchart to illustrate the workflow and escalation decisions. In addition to providing a single source of truth for employees, mapping out all these processes helps Bandwidth identify areas of improvement.

Bandwidth builds software architecture diagrams to document each of the hundreds of systems the company has and to show how they interact. These diagrams are used to optimize a system or to educate different departments on functionality. The engineering team creates network diagrams to document Bandwidth’s own network. They pass these to the support team to make it easier for them to track issues when they get support calls.

Justin Hindman, IT Manager at Bandwidth, explains:

“Sometimes we make a diagram to decide what we want to change. We build them to show how a system looks so it can be handed off to another group for support maintenance. Our engineering team builds diagrams so other teams can have the understanding they need to speak intelligently regarding technical aspects." 

Real-time collaboration

These diagrams are shared across the org via email or a link from Lucidchart, and employees can work on documents together in real time—which is invaluable for the company. Matthew Wolber, Director of IT Infrastructure, explains:

 “The biggest benefit of Lucidchart is being able to share and work on diagrams in real time as a group.”

As they use these diagrams to collaborate, Bandwidth has found that visuals build a common language among employees. Matthew says:

“Lucidchart is a way to visually represent information. It helps us get different kinds of learners on the same page. It’s always powerful to have a visual.” 

Armed with Lucidchart, anyone at Bandwidth can take advantage of this common language to communicate their own work and better understand others, creating the synergy needed for success.