For the in-house marketing and creative team at Old National Bank (ONB), having a robust creative process supported by a purpose-built creative workflow management platform is critical. So critical, in fact, that they have always been on the cutting edge of workflow and project management technology.

Vanessa Wilkison, Marketing Operations Manager at ONB, explained their technology journey. “When I joined the bank about 12 years ago, we were managing all our marketing and creative work in spreadsheets and email. Pretty quickly we began looking for a platform to help us optimize, and we adopted an early Marketing Resource Management (MRM) platform. It was pretty old-school, one of the very first MRMs on the market. We eventually decided to upgrade and came on board with Inmotion Classic in 2016. Then, we saw the launch of inMotion Ignite at the end of 2018, and we were excited to upgrade to the next generation of creative workflow!”

As one of the earliest adopters of Inmotion Ignite, ONB has seen dramatic increases in efficiency in their creative workflows. By leveraging seamless collaboration, automation, and revamping key processes, ONB has seen a 38% decrease in projects, and a 44% decrease in tasks in their first full year on inMotion ignite. This increase in efficiency has allowed them to focus on quality over quantity, take on more complex, high-value projects, and empower their stakeholders to access and utilize existing assets more easily.

A clean slate

With the help of inMotion Classic, the marketing and creative team at ONB had already transformed their reputation and become a team that the organization depended on, as Vanessa described. “When I started, the marketing team had a bit of reputation for being slow. As we onboarded with inMotion Classic and started optimizing our processes we transformed, and today we are known as the department that can get it done – no matter what ‘it’ is.”

This newfound confidence in the marketing and creative team led to a deluge of new project requests. By 2018 the team was handling almost 1,500 projects a year, and nearly 8,000 tasks. This volume of work was a double-edged sword, as Vanessa explained.

“This explosion of projects was kind of a good thing and kind of a bad thing. You have to manage all that work, and of course, everyone wants everything done quicker. We are this relatively small team doing a massive amount of work and doing it quickly. We needed to evolve our process, and also start leveraging more automation and collaboration features to manage the work effectively.”

When Vanessa saw the new inMotion ignite platform, she decided it was the perfect time to revisit their creative workflow and start with a clean slate. “I started by talking with my team and the other teams that we work with and asked them what they liked and what they didn’t like about our current process. We looked at what was broken about our current system and what new functionality ignite offered to inspire us to rebuild the broken parts.”

Vanessa offered a few suggestions to other teams revisiting their process as they upgrade to a new creative workflow management platform:

1. Don’t opt for the quick fix. “Take a really hard look at what is working and what isn’t. If something is broken, take the time to evaluate it and properly rebuild it to work for your team.”
2. Take it slow. “Don’t make changes too rapidly or make your team uncomfortable with the change. Don’t force change before they are ready.”
3. Make it collaborative. “Bring the team into the process. Get their feedback so you secure buy-in early, which will ultimately give you better results.”

When it was all said and done, Vanessa’s team rebuilt about 60 – 70% of their process. Vanessa described the areas they changed the most:

• Business Areas. “This was a great opportunity for us to build out workflows for specific business areas. For example, our wealth management line of business has a whole different set of compliance rules than the rest of the bank, so we added our compliance person to the review route, so now she’s in the system and everything is documented.”
• Request Forms. “I took a really hard look at our job request forms and started asking a lot more penetrating questions. Now we’re getting much better information at the beginning of projects.”
• Review Routes. “We took a step back an evaluated who was being included on review routes. We added some people in and took others out. This way we know we have all the right people on the review, without any unnecessary layers holding things up.”

Upgrading to inMotion ignite

When it came to the task of upgrading from inMotion Classic to inMotion ignite, Vanessa and her team were not afraid to jump right in. The ignite launch was a perfect meeting of great timing and an experienced team. “For us, the switch to ignite was almost a non-event. In terms of the logistics, the end of the year and the holiday season are our slow time, so I was able to get ignite set up when weren’t having a lot of requests coming in. As for the team, as soon as they saw the demos they were on board. They were excited about some of the new features in ignite, and more importantly, they clearly saw the value in migrating to the new platform. Several of our team members have been here since the first MRM system, so they’ve seen the evolution of our process and how wonderfully inMotion supports it.”

Streamlined process with inMotion ignite

After a full year on inMotion ignite, Vanessa was able to leverage the reporting suite in ignite to show the increased efficiencies her team achieved. The biggest benefit for the team was a clear increase in efficiency from both the functionality in ignite and their revamped process. Key areas of improvement included:

• 37% decrease in requests. “We’ve empowered our stakeholders to find more things for themselves. For example, instead of requesting a flyer print from us, they can now access that in our print on demand system.”
• 38% decrease in projects. “We’re doing about the same amount of work as before, but we’re focused on quality, and we’re taking on bigger, more complex work. In 2019 we started using the Campaign Management feature in ignite and completed 10 campaigns, and in 2020 we’ll probably do close to 50 – a 400% increase in completed campaigns.”
• 44% decrease in tasks. “With the collaboration in ignite we’re able to get the same work done without having to make a task for every little thing. Again, it’s not about doing less, but doing it in such a streamlined way that we don’t have any clutter in the system.”

Some of the features in ignite that have helped Vanessa’s team achieve these outcomes include:

• Templates for projects and review routes. “Being able to instantly create full projects, including the review route, saves so much time, and the designer doesn’t have to figure it out. It has certainly decreased the amount of time the designers have to spend setting things up, since we’ve got it already built for them.”
• Auto-naming and custom fields. “Auto-naming for the jobs really helps streamline things, and both auto-naming and custom fields are so helpful in getting detailed reports on the things we want to track.”
• Kanban view. “My designers love the visual nature of Kanban Views. It’s a really easy and intuitive way for them to set up their daily to-do lists.”
• Custom notifications. “The team loves all the user-level customizations, especially for notifications. They like that they can turn off the notifications they don’t want to get and have a personalized experience.”

The payoff of early adoption

The early adoption of inMotion ignite has paid dividends. In 2020 they are on track to maintain and even increase the efficiencies they have already seen with ignite, which has allowed them to focus on being a strategic partner to their business and deliver better content outcomes for their brand. As Vanessa summed it up, “Work in ignite runs itself, to a large extent. The automation streamlines project management and takes care of following up with collaborators. That means my team and I are able to concentrate on higher-value work. We’re able to take the time to evaluate our processes and think of bigger, strategic plays we can make.”

Elise Hauser is a product and content marketer with a passion for telling brand stories. She has produced inMotionNow’s annual In-House Creative Management Report for 3 years, webinars, content sessions for major industry events reaching audiences of 1,000+, and of course, countless blog posts. When Elise isn’t writing about the marketing and creative industry at inMotionNow she is teaching economics and hanging out with her cat, Tucker, at her home in Raleigh, NC.