Jamie Orndorff is the Project Manager for Edward Marc Brands, a Pittsburgh-based, rapidly expanding manufacturer, wholesaler, and retailer of chocolate and ice cream products. Edward Marc’s creative team, who design packaging and marketing materials for the company’s three brands, implemented inMotion because Jamie saw how it could help them have easier review cycles, clearer feedback, and deliver content to market faster.
Edward Marc’s Approval Workflow
Edward Marc has a lot of products in market with a lot of different types of packaging, so the creative team’s primary responsibility is designing that packaging. New projects are typically triggered by a request from senior leadership, marketing, or R&D. That requester will generally act as the primary stakeholder responsible for reviewing the resulting creative work. Depending on the product or asset being designed, additional stakeholders may be required as reviewers and some may be optional. Also, different team members are responsible for reviewing specific portions of the packaging, such as the front label or the ingredient list. All told, there are sometimes can be as many as 10 reviewers that are needed to review and approve a creative asset.
Results from inMotion
Easier Reviews
Before implementing inMotion, the only way for Jamie to collect feedback on creative work from stakeholders was by printing proofs and walking around the office to track people down.
Now that the team at Edward Marc has inMotion’s online proofing and automated routing, Jamie spends less time walking the office, nudging reviewers, and figuring out where proofs are. inMotion’s online review environment is user-friendly, so even non-tech-savvy stakeholders can quickly and easily provide feedback on work in progress. “People are finding the tool to be very intuitive,” says Jamie.
Clearer Feedback
In the past, the creative team at Edward Marc struggled with an approval process that led to printing errors or missing packaging elements because feedback collection was so unreliable. “In the past, we had no way of collecting all of that feedback back to the designers so they knew what to change and why. There was no record – just hallway conversations and hoping that noting was missed,” explains Jamie.
“We were looking to provide a better way to gather comments and approvals for documents that needed multiple approvals from various departments.”
With inMotion, the process is much more organized, as all feedback is collected in a single source and an audit trail of comments and sign-offs exist for every proof. But Jamie’s favorite features is @mentioning, which allows the team to collaboratively review proofs, allowing reviewers to reply to one another’s questions within the proof comments, instead of forcing an additional review cycle to address them. The team’s major goal was to reduce errors and number of reprints, and since implementing inMotion, the team has not had to reprint anything.
Faster Content to Market
“One of my goals was to move faster in approvals,” says Jamie. “It used to take 2-3 weeks to route items throughout the team. Now we’re down to 2-3 days. This is a HUGE goal that we’ve achieved.”
Like many in-house creative teams, Edward Marc needed to route proofs to multiple departmental stakeholders to ensure compliance for photos, ingredients, nutritional statements, etc. Typically, a proof would need 3-4 rounds of reviews through multiple stakeholders before reaching final approval, with each review taking 2-3 days. Contributing to the slow review cycles were reviewer questions, tracking down missing printed proofs, and feedback that was delivered piecemeal to designers.
Implementing inMotion’s review environment made it simple for stakeholders to access proofs, provide feedback, collaborate with other reviewers, and get proofs approved.
With inMotion’s creative workflow management capabilities, it’s fast and easy for Jamie to automatically route proofs to all stakeholders, track proofs that are out for review, and collect clear feedback for her creative team.
Learn how your team could improve your review and approval process with inMotion ignite. Schedule a demo today!