Marketing Automation Portal

Challenge:
A 40-person marketing team is in high gear, creating marketing collateral for a 1,200 person global sales spread across 5 continents. Documents are routed for approval via sneaker-net or email, giving no visibility into project status and no way of identifying bottlenecks in the production process. Designers and writers spend much of their time managing the approval process, which takes away from the resources they can commit to creative work.

Solution:
Shepard Associates conducts an in-depth analysis of the "as-is" process used to create, approve, and distribute marketing collateral. We redesign the process so that work can begin three months early, the approval process is simplified, and each project has a clearly defined charter that can be used to inform feedback and judge quality of execution. Working from this new process, we then architected a workflow-enabled production intranet that tracked projects from inception all the way through distribution. The time spent looking for assets decreases by more than 45%, marketing managers are able to view raw assets and finished projects without special software on their desktop, enabling them to be more involved in the creative process.