Business Focus - Marketing - Retail Products

Retail businesses have been adapting to the massive shift towards online shopping. Many of the traditional brick-and-mortar establishments have been moving much of their marketing efforts to embrace the digital marketing channels. As a result, the production of marketing materials has expanded wildly from just print assets to all kinds of digital assets. These new forms include website, email, paid social, mobile application, and text messaging. Related, production speeds between ideation and finalization have increased dramatically to accommodate the near instant production/publication readiness of digital assets.

Like so many others, this customer evolved their digital campaign management practices to support their very seasonal campaign cadence. They developed an effective spreadsheet-based campaign tracker. They involved requesters from varied business areas to input campaign characteristics like themes, promotions, and projects. The business areas input the related assets and collaborated with the production teams through email and meetings. All participants used a coded naming standard to store and search for network-based asset files. They used the stand-alone tool ProofHQ to support the asset review and approval steps. Final publication was also relied on the tracker and the network-based asset files locations. Although the process worked, the opportunities for automation improvement were many and huge.

Challenge

This implementation team’s primary challenge was the successful replacement of a seemingly still manual process. As they described, the process was error prone for many reasons. The tracker file was easy and difficult to create and update for the varied theme, promo, project, and related asset details. Changes to the tracker file were not always noted; some assets changed, cancelled, or disappeared without knowing who made the edits and when. The network file system was familiar but needed to be manually audited for alignment to the tracker file. Items cancelled were not always removed from the file system. Searching through the network file system for prior used assets, like copy or images, was slow to do; files often had to be previewed in large preview icons or opened to see them. Publication of assets lacked a rigor of always knowing which assets were current. Finally, knowing who has contributed to the assets was simply ambiguous; meetings and emails to seek out past, current, and upcoming work items was a daily burden.

Solution

Adobe Workfront – A Components Platform Approach

The high-level goal of this implementation was to automate the creation of product marketing assets. The high-level campaign management process was segmented into its request, project, resource, and asset management processing structures. Campaign management was also broken down to track its development/processing parts: overall theme, promos, sub-themes, projects, assets, asset review, and asset publication. The Workfront platform was used to pace timeline development management, change and cancellation management, and asset status reporting. The Workfront integrated proofing application replaced formerly standalone Proof HQ. The Adone Experience Manager (AEM), a content management system (CMS), was used for the publication and search of final digital assets. The AEM Enhanced Connector was used to set up predefined Workfront folders to tie in AEM. And Workfront Fusion was used to perform highly repeatable processes, as highlighted below.

Adobe Workfront Fusion – Connecting Processes Together.

Adobe Workfront Fusion was used to automate highly repeatable processes. The client was coached to focus on using big-lift and high-value automations over doing simple transactional integrations, like many Fusion users pursue. This enterprise processing focus yielded several thousands (estimated as 25 to 32,000) of hours that would have been manual application clicks. The functions that were automated are listed below.

Convert a request to the main theme and its theme project.

Convert theme, promo, and project requests to projects, pre-loading with standard asset requests as predefined in a standard operation manual.

Convert asset requests to asset tasks and related document file codes.

Drag and drop files from a common location to the pre-defined AEM location for processing into the AEM search areas.

Audit and authorize data change requests that propagate through the theme’s projects, assets, and document file codes.

Audit and authorize cancellation requests that also propagate through the theme’s projects, assets, and document file codes.

Organizational Change Management

The customer was well-prepared for the level of planning and effort associated with a system migration. They were eager to develop the new processes based on ideas of the existing system, but with improvements. They expected to associate changes between the platforms based on classes of users broken into the operating groups and based on readiness to change. They structured just-in-time training for the new system based on the new processes aligned with the legacy mapped functions. They developed persona-based training and held repeated sessions to coach users into the system.

Systems Change Management

A system change management practice was implemented early during the implementation efforts. Workfront change requests were entered into a Workfront request queue. These requests provided insight to the problem being solved. The Workfront administrators used the requests to keep track of the resolutions including details on environment changes, communication needs, and known obstacles to remember. As they discovered, these requests become essential for first understanding change across Adobe Workfront, Adobe Workfront Proofing, Adobe Workfront Fusion, the AEM Enhanced Connector, and AEM; just changing a part across the enterprise collection of applications did kill one process.

Benefits