Marketing Agency Cuts Costs, Improves Productivity with Powerful Collaboration Soluti

Situation

In the last decade, many marketing agencies shifted from fixed-fee client contracts to billable hours, particularly when it was difficult to predict how much time would be needed for complex projects. A challenge for successful marketing agencies—with dozens of clients, multiple departments, and offices in several cities—is to organize a system to track the billable hours of hundreds of employees.

Agencies such as Digitas use financial activity codes to record billable hours. Headquar-tered in Boston, Massachusetts, Digitas is a leading integrated marketing agency with offices in Chicago, London, New York, and San Francisco. Digitas has approximately 1,100 employees, of whom 900 are consultants. The company’s industry-leading clients include Allstate, American Express, AT&T, Delta Air Lines, and General Motors.

To record billable hours, each client project at Digitas is assigned a financial activity code to track work associated with it. “The activity code is the single most important identifier in a service agency because it ties revenue and costs back to clients,” says Erik Dubovik, Vice President, Director of IT, Digitas.

In the past, the company’s finance department used a manual, paper-based process to generate and deliver an average of 150 activity codes each week—more than 7,800 times per year—for new projects. More than 30 client teams requested activity codes by e-mail, phone, or fax. The process, althoughultimately effective, was cumbersome andtime consuming.

In addition, teams relied on e-mail and file servers as their main collaborative tools because Digitas did not have a central location to store project information. Employees frequently had to spend time digging through hundreds of e-mail messages or disorganized file folders to find specific documents.

“Our existing document management system didn’t integrate well with our business processes,” Dubovik says. “Employees stored documents and marketing collateral in their e-mail boxes, on their laptops or desktops, or on our file servers. Sometimes information was difficult to find, so there was a risk of lost intellectual property. The process also used a lot of storage space and created a heavy administrative and financial burden on the IT department.”

As a marketing agency, Digitas constantly is working to improve the productivity of its clients’ marketing investments. One of the most important ways it can do this is by improving the productivity of its ownoperations. Working with Microsoft Consulting Services and Internosis, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, Digitas looked for a solution to:

Streamline the activity code process.

Lower the cost of IT operations.

Cut costs of mailbox and file server maintenance.

Create a central location for collaboration and storage of project information.

Minimize the risk of lost intellectual property.

Integrate with existing company systems such as Lawson’s accounts payable solution.

Maintain a familiar work environment that requires minimal training.

Solution

To automate its activity code process, Digitas integrated numerous Microsoft® technologies with the company’s existing Oracle 8.1 database in a Lawson Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) general ledger and human resource system.

The deployment began in early September 2003 with the first phase of a pilot project to streamline the distribution of activity codes. Two small teams of senior marketing associates and financial analysts started using Microsoft Office Professional Enterprise Edition 2003 with the InfoPathTM 2003 information gathering program.

In the pilot’s second phase, two weeks later, Digitas introduced a central, organized workspace to two finance managers and 32members of a team working on a specific client account. Digitas and Internosis usedMicrosoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003 and the Windows® SharePoint Services technology in the Windows ServerTM 2003 operating system to create a site containing storage space for searchable documents, supported by Windows Server2003 and the Microsoft SQL ServerTM 2000 database, part of Windows Server SystemTM.

Digitas and Internosis developed an InfoPath form for the marketing group to request activity codes from the finance department. Because InfoPath supports XML, the industry-standard language for organizing and storing data, information gathered using InfoPath forms is more easily integrated with the business applications used by Digitas. For example, when the form is opened by a marketing associate, the Lawson ERP system automatically populates it with existing company data. (See Figure 1.)

The marketing associate completes and submits the form, which is routed through aWindows SharePoint Services site to the finance department. After reviewing the information, a financial analyst enters a new activity code into the form, which is transmitted back to the Lawson ERP system and automatically added to the company database. The completed request form, with an approved activity code, then is routed through the SharePoint site back to the marketing associate.

Each client team has its own SharePoint site to collaborate on projects and store documents. The establishment of organized team sites reduces the use of mailboxes and file servers to store information. In addition, SharePoint Portal Server enables workers to search information stored on the sites, so they no longer have to sift through hundreds of e-mail messages to find important information.

Benefits

The new collaboration solution saves time, improves productivity, and substantially cuts costs. The streamlined activity code process is expected to provide considerable cost savings to the company. “The time and cost savings we will receive from our new Microsoft Office System solution are amazing,” says Dubovik. “We expect to save $675,000 annually in employee time by automating one of our key business processes, which is performed more than 7,800 times per year.”

Lower Cost of Operation with Centralized Workspace for Collaboration and Storage

In addition to significant savings from the new billing process, the creation of Windows SharePoint Services sites considerably cuts IT administration costs. The new workspace provides team storage areas for documents and marketing collateral, reducing dependency on e-mail and file servers administered by the IT department. WithSharePoint sites, employees spend less time searching for information, which also improves productivity.

“Previously, large files of marketing collateral were swapped around in huge e-mail boxes that made it hard to find desired files, increasing the potential for lost documents,” says Internosis Technical Architect Matt Russell. “Sites created by Windows SharePoint Services enable teams to archive and share their work, while SharePoint Portal Server also offers search functionality.”

By storing documents on Windows SharePoint Services sites, the IT department was able toreassign the duties of one full-time employee who was previously dedicated to file server administration. The company also no longer needs costly backup tapes. Instead, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager 5.2 is used to backup SharePoint Portal Server 2003and Windows SharePoint Services sites. “We expect to decrease IT storage costs by $325,000 by reassigning one worker and saving on hardware,” Dubovik says. “We used to spend almost $20,000 each quarter on backup tapes. We’re very excited about this Microsoft solution.”

Automated SolutionThat Integrates NewTechnology with Existing Systems

Automation of the new billing process increases productivity and decreases the potential for duplicate data entry and other errors. The new process takes approximately 5 to 15 minutes for each activity code, compared with a wide range of time needed—from 30 minutes to 24 hours—for the previous paper-based system. Because it is all automated, the potential for errors and lost data is substantially reduced.

“The solution enhances productivity of the marketing and finance departments by reducing the time needed to respond to activity code requests and by increasing the accuracy of data that’s automatically populated from other Digitas systems into InfoPath forms,” Russell says.

Improved Knowledge About CompanyBusiness Practices

Digitas benefits from improved team efficiencies and collaboration through the use of Windows SharePoint Services sites for documents and client information. The new work management process increases company knowledge sharing through real-time access to active projects and corporate best practices. The new solution also enables specific data to be collected and then searched. By searching the terms “Web sites” or“direct mail campaigns,” for example, Digitas can analyzeclient requests for specific marketing services and determine business trends.

“In the past, we didn’t track information about whether a client received marketing services to develop a Web site or to create a direct mail campaign because we didn’t have a business process to search that type of data in a meaningful way,” Dubovik explains. “InfoPath and SharePoint technologies capture valuable information, which helps teams get relevant results quickly, pool resources, and share best practices of experts across the enterprise. It’s powerful and transformational.”

Familiar Work Environment

InfoPath meets the company’s business requirement for a familiar work environment because its forms look similar to those used by Digitas in its previous paper-based process. Because the desktop environment of InfoPath is familiar to most users, the solution requires little training.

The pilot project was so successful that Digitas expects to deploy the solution to approximately 1,100 employees in the company’s five offices by the end of 2003.

Microsoft Office System

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