By implementing HEAT, the service management solution from FrontRange Solutions, to manage its projects faster and with greater strategic impact for its clients, Espial, a brand agency of the year finalist and South Africa`s fastest growing design agency (Financial Mail - Adfocus 2004), has changed the face of the local 2D and 3D design and advertising industry.
"We`re the only agency in the country to use a modern, flexible information technology (IT) solution to manage our `traffic` function and, thereby, reduce the paper-intensive nature of our work," says Espial managing director, Paula Sartini.
"We have an electronic job bag, which is opened by our client-facing staff rather than our traffic department, and HEAT automatically assigns tasks forward - with clear deadlines - to the relevant people in the organisation. It also escalates delayed jobs to people with the necessary authority to clear the logjams.
"Everyone in the organisation works off a shared pool of data and, as a result, we`ve been able to scale down the traffic function to a single person, who no longer focuses on admin, but on more effectively co-ordinating people`s time and effort.
"All of which enables us to run leaner while significantly boosting the speed and cost-effectiveness with which we can execute our client`s strategic design requirements. We`ve been able to maximise the time our creative teams have for coming up with the perfect idea. That`s a huge competitive advantage in an industry in which admin invariably creates snarl-ups in the workflow from brief through to creative and then to production."
Sartini, who has paid her dues as a marketer in the IT industry, recognised the similarities between the processes involved in delivering IT services, for which HEAT was originally designed, and those involved in delivering creative design solutions.
"They`re both project-based. There`s a clear beginning followed by a formula set of intermediate steps to get to a designated, accurately defined outcome. It made sense, therefore, to use a solution that is acknowledged in its industry as best in class."
Some customisation of HEAT was necessary, to adjust it to the terminology and processes of the design and advertising industry. "But," Sartini says, "we did all the thinking up-front. So getting the solution in and up and running was quick and easy."
FrontRange Solutions (SA) managing director, Tracey Newman, says the application of HEAT in a creative design environment emphasises the new and urgent focus in business on flexibility in IT systems. "So much business activity is routine - and similar from one organisation to another as well as from one industry to another. Business has a right to expect, therefore, that one IT solution should be applicable in a multitude of different scenarios.
"Unlike the early years of business solutions, however, where software was indeed applicable in a multitude of scenarios so long as the customer organisation adjusted its processes to the software, these days customers want the software to adjust to them.
"FrontRange understood that more than a decade ago. Which is why solutions like HEAT are still around - and getting even more customer-centric by the day."
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