“The most successful in-house creative teams recognize that today’s increasing demand for content requires a new approach to creative workflow management. Teams must deliver faster while adapting to changing priorities without impacting the quality of their work.
For over a decade, inMotionNow has served creative teams by streamlining their workflows to help them be more efficient and keep up with demand. However, as creative teams play an increasingly important role in the business, they are under more pressure than ever, and the way they work is evolving. How are creative teams changing the way they work, and what do they need from a modern creative workflow management solution to support that work?
inMotion ignite is a complete reimagining of creative workflow, built on the latest in modern technology and rooted in the way creative teams work today. We’re taking our decade + years of experience and jumping ahead to build a solution that will redefine the landscape. inMotion ignite brings marketing and creative closer together, and allows their teams to strengthen collaboration and bridges the communication chasm that currently exists in most organizations. ignite has fewer walls, more collaboration, and smartly crafted integrations to ensure it can connect to the tools creative and marketing teams use most.”
– Brian Kessman, Why ignite?
inMotion ignite’s Improved Automation Made Our Team Jump for Joy: A Traffic Manager’s Story
By Virginia Nanni, Marketing Traffic Lead, MSC Industrial Supply Co.
As MSC Industrial Supply, Inc. prepares to migrate to inMotion ignite from the inMotion Classic platform, there have been many wish list items over the past years that our Traffic Team has been eagerly anticipating. The one at the top of our list was more “automation” when creating projects – easier workflow templates, dependencies/notifications, and date calculations – to name a few. I am happy to say that ignite delivers on all of these, and then some!
Josh Trauberman, Director of Product from inMotion, gave me a shout out at the inMomentum Conference – 2019 because he knew how happy I would be for the first enhancement— the addition of Dependencies when setting up the tasks in a Project Workflow Template. I think that was the happiest I’ve been over an announcement since the lineup for the New Orleans Jazz Fest in 2012 (hint: Foo Fighters were headlining!). As it stands in Classic, if users do not communicate with each other when completing their tasks, the only way you know your task is due is to check them daily on the platform and hope that you’re not late. However, with the upgraded Dependencies feature, I soon found out while setting up my first Template, you can link tasks to others. This prevents someone from completing a task unless the one previously done is marked as complete. I’ve waited so long for this moment that I was giddy while setting up all my Dependencies. But wait, it gets better…
Auto Notifications
Along with Dependencies comes Auto Notifications. This is another top wish list item we had been waiting on that came true. As previously stated, in Classic, there is no way to notify the next user that they can begin their task without emailing them a comment. Using the Dependencies function in ignite solves for this. Once a task is marked complete, if the next task is dependent, the Team Member assigned will get an email notification telling them they can now begin their task. I can see this as being a very well received feature by our MSC Team Members. They will be relieved of a step that they often overlook and won’t miss doing.
Proofing Workflows
While creating my Project Workflow Templates, I discovered we can now add Proofing Workflows. This is also a huge game changer! Currently our Traffic Leads will set up a Project Template and it is up to the task owners to choose a Proofing Workflow or create one on the fly. This feature will eliminate guesswork and makes it part of the tasks, saving a huge amount of time for our team. What’s even better, the task is shown on the same screen as all other Tasks, so there is better visibility. Also, Proofing Workflows are totally editable. This will allow for all Team Members to switch out Stakeholders (reviewers) and add/delete a tier if need be.
Automatic Date Calculations
Last, but not at all least, the Planning feature when building templates has helped us calculate workflow durations, align tasks that run concurrent with one another, and most of all, it will auto-fill due dates when creating new projects. It makes it easier to edit the templates as well, whether it’s changing durations or adding or deleting tasks. This was very advantageous with planning complicated, non-sequential workflows.
These are just a few features we are looking forward to. There are many more within the ignite platform such as Stakeholders visibility to project process, @Mentioning, and a new feature that provides a more collaborative interface with Team Members and Requesters. All of these will be a huge incentive for MSC Industrial Supply to migrate sooner rather than later, and I for one, am looking forward to it and can’t wait to show our team.
Virginia Nanni is a Traffic Manager who is passionate about developing organizational-wide processes and meeting critical deadlines. She has been part of the MSC Industrial Supply Co. for over 20 years and has successfully managed the production of their “Big Book” and other annual catalogs throughout her career. She enjoys the challenges of learning new software, such as ignite, and successfully rolling it out to the rest of her team through training and problem solving. A believer in the importance of good work-life balance to remain productive and positive, when she isn’t working Virginia enjoys many things, including traveling, running a book club, dinner with friends, and hanging out with her Schnoodle, Caleb. Virginia currently resides near Lake Norman, NC.