Case Study: Assurant
Assurant, Inc. is a global provider of risk management solutions, protecting where consumers live and the goods they buy. The Fortune® 500 company focuses on the housing and lifestyle markets and is among the market leaders in mobile device protection, vehicle protection, and mortgage valuation and field services, among others.
THE SITUATION
Assurant’s in-house agency used two disparate systems that lacked integration capabilities, which led to large groups of employees using one system or the other. In some cases, those groups were relying on post-it notes, emails and phone calls to push projects through production and approval hoops. Of course, the lack of consistent processes within the group took its toll on productivity and frustrated team members.
This geographically-dispersed team — consisting of 70 writers, designers, video and audio producers, programmers, photographers, and others — receives over 20 new marketing projects a day. Those projects originate from over 800 internal customers and represent a broad range of marketing assets including brochures, direct mail packages, videos, training materials, websites and more.
“One of the things that we were lacking was proof approval, along with not having a real workflow.”
Kelly M. – Marketing Traffic Manager
THE SOLUTION
Assurant wanted desperately to move away from its fragmented processes for managing projects to a more holistic solution where the customer could log-in and track progress, proof and approve, and review time.
Before deciding on RoboHead, the Assurant team went through an extensive review process of several project management options, which was eventually narrowed down to a few choices. Because Assurant is in a heavily-regulated industry—insurance—all of the software options it considered had to pass the scrutiny of the company’s IT security and compliance departments.
Assurant considered RoboHead to be the most robust software package for its needs. One of the most significant pain points for users with the previous software was a complex time-tracking function.
“Monitoring resource utilization is very important.”
As a traffic manager, Kelly M. needs to know at any given time who’s available to work on a project. Instead of checking with team members individually, she can instantly see who has the bandwidth. “For me, monitoring the resource utilization is very important.” And since her in-house team bills its customers through chargebacks, Kelly knows instantly the hours team members expend on every project. “If one of our business units uses 50 percent of our time then they get 50 percent of our chargeback.”
Agency team members spend just a little time each day updating where they’re at on each project but the benefits of staying up-to-date on progress far outweighs the few minutes it takes to update a project’s status.
COMPLETE PROJECT VISIBILITY
Another RoboHead benefit is that team members have complete visibility into the projects they are working on. A graphic designer, for instance, can see who’s the writer, producer or overall coordinator for any project. Any team member can now view a project and see the entire process, due dates and workflow.
TRAINING PAVED THE WAY
Once Assurant decided on RoboHead, training sessions were scheduled with the agency’s project managers and system administrators. Following the large group sessions with RoboHead trainers, Assurant staged several individual sessions with smaller groups to help team members understand the full range of capabilities.
As is the case with adopting any new software platform there were a lot of questions, but thanks to RoboHead’s intuitive user-interface along with robust online training aids and videos, employees found the path to productivity to be smooth. They also used content from RoboHead’s help section to create a how-to guidebook and published and stored it in their RoboHead library so any user could access it.
The added insurance for this insurance company? RoboHead’s U.S.-based tech and customer support center is always ready to take Assurant’s phone calls or answer an email.
THE RESULTS
RoboHead Team Size: 700+
68% increase in new projects
79% increase in new tasks
10% decrease in project and task duration
“RoboHead made our department more productive. The project templates have been very helpful!”
Kelly M. – Marketing Traffic Manager
It’s been a year since RoboHead went to work for Assurant’s in-house agency. Not only have agency members fully embraced the software but so have clients. Customers enjoy the ease of reviewing and commenting on projects moving through the creative process. For Kelly’s team, that’s a win because they’re able to track and record the history of a project start to finish. “If something goes to print, and then it’s wrong, we’re able to look back and see what we missed,” said Kelly.
Traffic managers are perennially looking for tactics to improve productivity, and this is where the software shines for Kelly. “The project templates have been very helpful!” The department developed a host of templates for common projects. Now, all they do is choose a template, click through a few fields and get to work. She estimates the templates save her five minutes on every project, and that adds up over a day’s work. Kelly has merely to assign resources, and the team can begin the project. No emails, post-it notes, phone calls, and questions. RoboHead has made our department more productive because they [employees] always know where they stand—instead of waiting for an email.”
A recent enhancement to the software has also made it easier for Kelly to manage workload because resource utilization information is now on the same page with job assignment data. “It makes my job much more efficient.” Now users don’t have to tab or open a new page to view more information.
Put RoboHead to work for you.
RoboHead is a project management tool loved by the creative and marketing industry. If you’re interested in learning more about this software, we would be happy to create a customized demonstration based on your existing processes and workflows to show you how RoboHead can improve efficiencies, communications, and delivery of work.
