International Creative and Production Agency Case Study

The Challenge

Creative Spark is an award winning creative and production agency with studios in Europe, Australia and North America. They work with world-leading clients in the home entertainment, personal care and luxury goods sectors such as Walt Disney, Universal Music, 20th Century Fox, Sony and Paramount.

As part of a larger group, one of the largest packaging manufacturers in the world, Creative Spark brings over 45 years’ experience producing the highest quality integrated marketing communications, specialising in promotions, packaging and point of purchase. With such a prestigious portfolio of international clients, they are trusted to create, produce and co-ordinate time sensitive creative, production and distribution projects for global brands whilst ensuring significant operational efficiencies, cost savings and brand consistency.

The home entertainment, personal care and luxury goods markets are highly competitive and demanding sectors, requiring continual innovation and creative solutions to be delivered to high production standards and distributed internationally to meet critical delivery deadlines. As such, the client required a powerful platform for managing their international supply chain and streamline sourcing of complex, multi-part and deadline driven production requirements.

In any one project the client’s team could be sourcing anything from simple marketing collaterals through to a collectors DVD pack or store branding and Point of Sale kits. Often these projects have a ‘no-fail’ delivery deadline to synchronise with TV, press, online and instore product launches. Additionally, where international brands require global or regional product launches, they need to co-ordinate across multiple territories and ensure the frequently changing requirements of retailers and distributors are met, whilst keeping to demanding schedules.

Operationally, Creative Spark needed a robust online platform that could be accessed from their production hubs and suppliers in Europe, Australia and North America at any time 24x7x365. With a diverse product and service offering, they needed to be able to accurately and quickly evaluate prices and make quotations. In addition they needed visibility of delivery schedules from global logistics, supply chain and replicators, as well as over 30 specialist manufacturers around the world.

With the global nature of international campaigns, the client needed sophisticated project and asset management tools to control creative briefs, complex production and translation projects and the tracking and billing of costs to client projects. As such, the solution needed to manage such demands, plus needed to readily integrate into existing systems.

The Solution

Claritum Enterprise helps Creative Spark’s team of designers, specifiers, buyers and production specialists to specify new projects quickly and accurately using a range of specification questionnaires. These questionnaires capture every element of the requirement in a structured format, so that suppliers can respond with accurate pricing and delivery schedules. The online questionnaires also allow for design files to be uploaded and free text descriptions of complex needs such as structural engineering or fulfilment of multi-part projects to enhance project accuracy and eliminate errors.

The online tool enables Creative Spark’s supply chain managers to control supplier profiles ensuring the right projects are bid with the most appropriate capabilities for the job. Suppliers can respond within the Claritum Enterprise platform by entering their pricing and delivery information. They can assess whether to single source an entire project from one supplier or to multi-source the components from several specialists and then combine the parts into the finished product. This approach gives their team visibility of each supplier bid and production option and therefore evaluate the optimum supplier or suppliers to select. As the company operate internationally, they can compare the costs of sourcing locally against buying from international suppliers.

Due to the project driven and often seasonal demands of international clients, their workload can put considerable pressure on the team at specific times of the year. So, Claritum’s easy to use Enterprise platform helps the core team to maximise efficiencies and minimise administration, avoiding errors, re-keying, time-consuming manual processes and therefore frees the team up to add more value to clients and get the best from suppliers. Additionally, the intuitive Claritum workflow enables new or contract staff to adhere to the best practice processes at demanding times of the year. Contract staff can utilise existing templates and project workflow, select from preferred suppliers and place orders, all under the control of the management team.

Management have comprehensive permissions and workflow controls to ensure alignment to best practice processes and the real time management information they need to ensure smooth operations, client and supplier side billing and accurate client reporting.

To streamline billing, Claritum exports client sales ledger and supplier purchase ledger data on approved costs to their financial systems, for invoicing and settlement This process helps track revenues and expenditure, reduce administration time and improve the accuracy of their invoicing processes.

Benefits

With an ever evolving set of requirements and critical deadlines, the Claritum Enterprise platform enables Creative Spark to issue request-for-quotes, create and manage multiple versions of a project and quickly compare a range of options. Claritum gives Creative Spark both the flexibility they need and the controls necessary to meet budgets. The company continues to grow their international client base, increase revenues, protect margins and provide a great service to clients due to the efficiencies and savings provided by the Claritum Enterprise platform.