This is the third in a three-part blog series about how creative operations are measured, and how that measurement helps creative teams do their work more efficiently.
In the first part of this series I looked at why creative operations, marketing and creative production teams are increasingly turning to metrics to shape and optimize their creative operations process, and in the second part I gave an example of one national retailer who was able to reduce change requests by focusing on creative operations metrics.
In this post, I’ll be looking at another specific example of a company who used creative operations metrics to improve and optimize their process. This customer, a Top 30 financial services company, used ConceptShare to monitor how long reviews were taking to complete, and they were able to identify and reduce bottlenecks in the process.
The Company:
Top 30 financial services company# of Creative Projects:
50 – 125 at any one timeBackground:
In regulated industries like financial services, having the legal and compliance team review marketing assets can be a huge advantage, which is why this financial services company decided to bring them in on every marketing project. But, as anyone who works with creative review knows, adding another layer of review adds time to the process, and creates a potential roadblock. The advantage disappears if the legal and compliance review takes too long, or delays the production schedule.To structure the process and preserve this advantage, the creative and legal teams worked together to implement a service-level agreement (SLA) so that everyone was on the same page about the expected turnaround time for marketing assets. That way, projects would stay on track and still benefit from legal review, which helps minimize their risk.
The only problem? Their review process was taking place via email, so it wasn’t very measurable. There was no visibility into whether the deadlines for review were actually being met. To monitor turnaround times, they would have to go through dozens of emails, and record the turnaround time in a separate document. With dozens of projects on the go at any one time, this wasn’t a viable way for them to evaluate against their key response time metric.
Creative Operations Metric & Goal:
Ensure that legal reviews happened within the allocated timeframe: 1 day for high priority requests, 3 days for normal priority requests, and 5 days for low priority requests.How They Track Against the Metric and Goal:
Once they moved to ConceptShare, the company mandated that all approvals take place in the software, as opposed to happening over email. When a project is added for review, the marketing team can indicate whether it’s high, normal or low priority, as well as whom it’s being sent to for review. Since comments are time and date stamped, this creates a record of the time between a request being issued and approval being granted from the legal and compliance department.Analysis and Insight: Identify Bottlenecks in the Review Process
The creative operations team was able to review the data that was now available about the response time for high, normal and low priority projects. When they looked at the data for review times, they found that on average, requests were being filled mostly on time for each category, except for the high priority requests, which had to be reviewed within a day. This led their marketing and legal teams to look more closely at the data from the urgent requests.They found that for urgent requests, they could isolate certain reviewers who always met their requests within a day, while others took longer to turn around urgent requests. This insight helped them identify that certain members of the team were a bottleneck for urgent marketing reviews.
After the bottlenecks were identified, they examined the request process. By adjusting who was responsible for reviewing high priority requests to only include those members of the team who always met the required timeframe, the company was able to move much closer to having every project reviewed within the required timeframe.
Thanks to the focus on timeframe as a metric, and the data available in their new standardized process, the financial services company was able to ensure that all of the marketing collateral was reviewed on time and exceeded the review standards required in their highly regulated industry. They now know that marketing collateral won’t fall behind during the review stage, and that it will be accurate and meet all of the required legal standards.
Metrics can help improve creative operations in any industry, and this is just one example of how it helped to address a challenge unique to regulated industries. Let’s talk more about which creative operations metrics are most important in your business. Leave a comment or get in touch – I’d love to hear about how metrics are influencing your business.
Read the other posts in this blog series:
Post #1: Why should you measure Creative Operations?Post #2: How To Improve Process and Performance with Creative Operations Metrics: A Case Study