Context/Problem Statement:
A large multinational and top brand advertiser with marketing teams distributed around the world was facing financial pressure to streamline operations and drive the efficient use of its agency resources to meet its ambitious marketing goals. The company employs hundreds of marketers and has significant marketing budgets to promote its vast number of individual brands around the globe. The marketing teams go through an annual process to scope their requirements, share it with their designated agency partners so both parties can align on what type of deliverables must be produced and what agency resources (human and financial) are required to carry on these activities. This process was historically managed manually, using various templates to get local and regional markets and procurement teams aligned with guidance by the global marketing team.
Solution (ScopeDeliver™):
This brand advertiser asked Agency Mania Solutions to streamline, automate and improve their planning and scoping process to provide its marketing organization with timely, actionable scope, financial and staffing data. In close partnership with their marketing procurement team, Agency Mania Solutions revamped the end-to-end process, using its ScopeDeliver™ cloud-based solution, to bring much greater focus on deliverables and staffing details that would ultimately contribute to more effective plans of record, improved negotiations and guidance to agencies as well as better work. The solution allowed marketers to open and lock scopes throughout the year, always keeping a current view and updating agencies of scope or budget changes. The solution also allowed the agencies to update the marketing teams on a monthly or quarterly basis on where they stood with deliverables (project status), how much resources have been utilized (FTE/retainer) and facilitated financial reconciliations (in local currency and constant US dollars) without the burden of having to chase down this information or manually compile it.
Results:
• Identified significant efficiency gains
• Tremendous cost savings
• Consistent and automated process for sharing deliverables
• Efficient use of agency resources
• Integrated approach to managing agency partnerships
