--- United Health Care --- SR Revolution

The Challenge: 

A small, 3 person marketing department has no way to track marketing project requests and their associated costs. 

Requests are received via email, phone, post it note and even elevator conversations! In the heat of the marketing season, the emails fly back and forth and quickly get out of control. 

The result: substandard materials, missed deadlines, missed opportunities, unhappy internal clients. 

This small marketing department supported a national sales force with both business to business and business to consumer marketing materials, and often produced 1,000 different pieces every year. Their challenge was to organize the requests they received, maximize available resources by proactively managing each project in light of the larger slate of marketing initiatives, improve their ability to meet various deadlines and streamline the process of materials approval, which involved sign-off from two internal departments and the external customer. 

Solution was a web-based application that became the central workflow tool for Marketing. The tool, called Revolution, was used by the Sales Force to enter marketing requests. The tool then automatically assigned them to the appropriate Marketing resource based on the nature and scope of the project. 

Revolution also provided an online space for each project. This allowed each department to review the marketing pieces and approve them online. As changes were made during the creative process, Revolution tracked and stored information on each change. 

An unexpected benefit 

During our investigation of the existing processes in this Marketing Department, we uncovered another process that needed attention to close the marketing production loop. 

Legislation governing their product required the Marketing to maintain a file of all marketing pieces for five years after their use. 

The Legal Department, located in a different state, also needed ready access to this marketing file. As a result, both departments kept a manual file which was frequently incomplete due to poor processes. 

To solve this issue, Vela built an ad file module that collects and stores all the project information and a pdf of the final piece online. Search functionality has cut the time it takes to locate a past marketing piece from hours to minutes. 

BPM Success 

Since implementing Revolution in 2004, the Marketing Department has increased productivity by proactively managing its limited resources. 

Deadlines are seldom missed, and projects no longer fall through the cracks. Vela expanded Revolution in 2005 to collect all costs related to a marketing piece, providing the Marketing Director with an easy way to track cost by a variety of factors: by client, by salesperson, by line of business, within a state, or within a specified time period. 

The Marketing Department continues to rely on this web-based tool, which has enjoyed 99.999% uptime since its implementation and has handled several thousand marketing projects without issue.