Efficiency is the Killer App

Efficiency is the Killer App

Nick Patrissi, Industry Relations Manager, Kodak’s Graphic Communications Group

Working efficiently is a business imperative in today’s competitive global marketplace. A global business requires the integration of marketing processes with global business requirements. Marketing strategies must now expand to include cultural norms, buying criteria, and selling propositions for dozens of international locales and partners. Marketing teams must schedule, collaborate, and review print, broadcast, and multimedia material among themselves and many creative and production partners.

As worldwide operations become more and more complex, marketing, creative, and production professionals are continually challenged to do more with less without compromising quality or effectiveness. Marketing and brand managers with bottom line responsibility are forced to take a much closer look at process automation and efficiency to meet these new business challenges, and are turning to technology to enhance efficiency and eliminate costly manual processes.

Interest in cool marketing business tools is not new, although the blend of cutting edge innovative technology with the strict discipline of process management is emerging under the category name of “marketing automation.” Marketing automation is growing in many segments of the corporate landscape. Led by early adopters and marketing directors in the consumer packaging, financial services and pharmaceutical sectors, many marketing companies have implemented sophisticated marketing automation solutions. The Winterberry Group LLC, reported that over 76% of marketing end users surveyed stated that their organization’s demand for marketing automation technology increased over the last 12 months. Most marketing research firms project increasing budgets for marketing automation in the years ahead and technology providers are responding with cutting edge software and hardware platforms to accommodate the industry need.

Cutting edge technology tools + Process management Discipline – Costly manual interactions = Marketing Efficiency

Corporate marketing departments responding to corporate financial pressures are looking internally at impediments to speed, visibility and profit. The following is a list of identified operational problems within marketing operations:

• Lack of visibility into work in process

• Poor project management

• Manual processes, such as approvals

• Lack of team collaboration

• Inaccurate or laborious budget and expense management

• Time-consuming report or calendar production

• Low re-use of approved assets

• Poor campaign coordination and alignment of work with strategic plans

The future is bright for adoption of marketing automation! The adoption of marketing automation tools such as Kodak Design2Launch Solutions have tackled many of these problems, and enabled marketing giants in the pharmaceutical and consumer packaged goods industries to make significant improvements in process efficiency. Specific functional improvements include the reduction of process errors and routing time by streamlining such tasks as campaign briefs, project management, creative review and digital asset management.

• Average review cycle reduced from 56 to 6 days

• Number of status meetings per project reduced by 45%

• Amount of rework reduced by 38%

• Amount of time spent chasing down projects and files reduced by 65%

• Hard dollar costs from errors and proofing reduced by $1.2 million in year one.

“Marketing technology adoption is inevitable— and thus an imperative.” John Rizzi, CEO, E-Dialog

To Learn more about marketing automation solutions from Kodak visit www.automation.kodak.com.

© Kodak, 2008. Kodak and Design2Launch are trademarks of Eastman Kodak Company.