G2 leverages Symphony and the FD Consulting team to drive workflow efficiencies

Background

G2 – a WPP agency based in New York faced a number of operational constraints in trying to scale their digital business.  G2 engaged FD Consulting in March 2010 to work on a Business Transformation project to help automate and standardize their digital media processes.

Challenge

The challenges G2 faced were similar to the challenges faced in the industry; the rapid growth and continuing fragmentation of digital media.  Without a tool to help them automate their work-flow G2 found themselves spending an inordinate amount of time ‘doing’ rather than ‘thinking’. As a result G2 wanted to find a way to profitability scale their business and turned to FD Consulting for help.

Solution

The implementation of Symphony followed Facilitate Digital’s formally documented Business Transformation process which has been deployed to more than 50 agencies around the world.  The program draws on the extensive workflow and process expertise the FD consulting team has developed helping agencies.

FD Consulting engaged all levels of G2 to understand the key business requirements and strategic imperatives of G2. Building on the quantitative and qualitative data sourced via workshops and surveys, the FD Consulting team provided recommendations to G2’s senior management on best practice methods to standardise, integrate and streamline the media process.  The areas of recommendation included:

• How the agency engages with media partners
• How the agency engages with creative partners
• Standardisation of documents including Insertion Orders, Media Briefs, Media Plans, and Production Schedules
• Automation of ad operations
• Integration of finance process into the workflow

Through a series of “future-state” workshops leveraging process mapping and client-specific exceptions – G2 and FD Consulting arrived at a streamlined process that achieved the goal of standardizing and automating processes.

Results

Following the successful roll-out of the Symphony  platform, FD Consulting conducted a post-implementation survey to the entire G2 team to gather feedback and to identify areas to further improve and refine the digital operations.  This survey was conducted in May 2011 – 9 months after Symphony had been implemented.

The survey objectively captured G2’s experience of working with Symphony in terms of the efficiencies that had been realised.  Symphony was found to have delivered significant efficiencies within a short period of time which exceeded the expectations of G2 management:

• 29% of time saved briefing and engagement publishers
• 46% of time saved constructing and managing the media plan
• 28% of time saved buying and confirming media
• 80% of time saved setting up the campaign in the ad-server
• 63% of time saved managing publisher trafficking
• 30% of time saved generating reports for clients

On a weighted basis, the survey revealed a 36% time saving across the campaign life-cycle following the Symphony implementation. All respondents (i.e. the entire digital team) stated that they were “very satisfied” with the overall training and induction experience, ‘very satisfied’ being the highest possible satisfaction score