Leveraging Data to Drive Studio Efficiency

Challenges:
Lack of Data and Too Many Manual Tasks

Incomplete and Siloed Production Data

Manually updating hundreds of Excel files is no one’s idea of efficient or accurate data management, right? The lack of automation makes the exercise painstaking for studio teams as well. Orendt’s team was relying on those Excel files or FTP transfers to manage client accounts and their indivi dual requirements, and a lack of automation led to uncertainty about the information being complete, consistent, and up-to-date.

This lack of automatically collected, updated in real-time, and centralized data made it difficult to get a true sense of where there were inefficiencies in their processes and where it made the most sense to focus on improvement. It also meant they couldn’t get their client’s products online as fast as possible or make recommendations, like cross-selling opportunities, based on data.

But it wasn’t for lack of trying. The team at Orendt ran an efficient operation but were constrained by their technology and a lack of production data about their entire process from beginning to end.

Post-Production Was a Perennial Challenge

The team at Orendt was largely in the dark about external post-production. They weren’t receiving production data from vendors and had no oversight, which meant they didn’t know automatically if they were always receiving complete suites of imagery that met spec.

On top of that, transfers were slow and manual – they knew things could be better.
“It was totally by transferring data manually from FTP to FTP,” Lars Macario, Orendt’s Product Manager for Creative Force, says. “So there was no way to figure out if they were complete or not. And if you don't recognize that they're incomplete, you're going to send out pictures with mistakes or with wrong file names.”

Inconsistent and Sometimes Inaccurate File Naming

Sometimes it’s all in the name. As Lars notes, the lack of automation with file transfers led to incorrect files being shared and inconsistent naming conventions across Orendt’s client accounts (you can see how all of Orendt’s challenges were so interconnected).

When it was time to transfer files, whether internally or with clients, everything was being done manually through FTP. Lars shared that “transfers would sometimes be incomplete, or, at the very least, we didn’t have a simple way to notify all of the key stakeholders that the transfers were complete.”

Style Guides – Manually Updated, Light on Details, Print Versions Only, and Far Too Many of Them

Style guides at Orendt weren’t digitized, they were only available on set in print, which meant they needed to be updated manually every time a client changed a request, requirement, or creative direction.

This often led to them being out-of-date or worse, guaranteed re-works would be necessary when products had inevitably been shot according to one of the lingering style guides that wasn’t quite up-to-date.

It also meant the studio teams needed hundreds of style guides to keep track of requirements across all of their clients and the unique needs of the various product categories.

Difficulties Providing Operational Visibility and Production Oversight to Clients

The Orendt team wanted their clients to be as involved in production as they needed and wanted to be – whether that was to provide art direction, review selects, or track production in progress so they knew when final assets would arrive. But without an end-to-end production solution that wasn’t possible.

Trouble Forecasting and Planning Without Accurate Sample Data

Not knowing when things were going to arrive or what exactly they would receive made forecasting, planning, and adequately staffing very challenging.
The stress was compounded by a 48-hour turnaround time they are bound to in their client SLAs and made it all the more important that they could hit the ground running when items arrived. They also wanted to get products ready for check out and shipped back quickly so they could keep their stock volume as low as possible.

Solution:
Upgrade to Automation Over Manual

Data Captured Automatically and Updated in Real-Time Drives Performance

Goodbye, Excel sheets. With Creative Force automating input from a client’s data source, Orendt always has up-to-date information across all of their client accounts. This makes it easier to manage production and respond to changing client requests on the fly without any disruptions.

With the additional information now at their disposal, Orendt is even able to offer their clients cross-selling recommendations for products and outfits based on metadata captured in Creative Force’s on-set application.

“We aren’t losing time triple-checking our records before we approach a client about a new possibility,” Lars says. “We have reliable real-time data on the projects we’ve done and on the nature of our clients’ scope, so now we confidently approach them with anticipated needs.”

Quality Improves and Rejection Rates Decrease with Post-Production Insights

Having a smarter system now helps Orendt quantify the speed and quality of their post-production vendors. The accountability made possible with Creative Force’s Post-Production Vendor Report has helped the Orendt crew speed up timelines immensely.

Using the report they can now identify which of their vendors is better at specific product categories or retouching effects and can assign work based on each vendor’s specialty, greatly improving quality.

In fact, using data from the external post-production rejection report, the team was able to incrementally improve their style guides to reduce errors and ultimately bring their rejection rate down to less than .01%.

With the post-production stage so under control, Orendt is able to redistribute talent, as the overseeing team moved from four people to just one.

And the consistently improved quality has allowed Orendt to bypass the QC step following external post-production, saving more than seven hours per product, on average, and allowing their clients to get products online a full day faster!

File Naming and Asset Delivery Aided by Greater Operational Visibility

“It's so simple to just change a production process while we’re actually in production,” says Lars about the organizational transparency improved by automation.

With files named automatically and renamed instantly based on changes to the production process, and with assets saved at each stage of production, Orendt’s team doesn’t have to worry about creating a time-consuming administrative crisis when they encounter necessary mid-project redirection.