The Company

Zone Design are a creative agency based in Datchet, Berkshire.

They are clearly doing something very right. Within the space of just three years Zone has built a portfolio of high profile clients including Cadbury, JohnsonDiversey, Fiat Automotive, Bayer Pharmaceuticals, Iron Mountain, and are now established as a destination for top quality creative and innovative design.

But it's more than great design that's been driving this impressive growth.

The Challenge

Sue Armstrong, Operations Director at Zone explains. "We recognised at an early stage that to grow the business we had to have the correct tools in place."

"Due to the nature of a key client's work, handling the pan-European labelling with multi-approvals required, we found we were spending a huge amount of time just managing emails."

"Just to give you an idea, one label might need approval from sixteen countries around Europe. As each of these had a regulatory and marketing person involved in the approval, and then you had a number of overseers, you could end up with forty people involved in the approval process in total. This is perhaps at one end of the scale but even a more typical example might involve five countries and so around twelve people involved in the process."

Zone identified a number of other issues. As Sue continues, "With emails there was never one trail of artwork amends/approvals. Also, it might be the case that France would approve a label but it would then go through further revisions which they weren't aware of. Or they might not know about the feedback that Italy had been giving so the final version was not what they were expecting. Emails are just so problematic anyway. You can easily miss an email with amends, or it could get lost or misfiled or it simply might not get through to you."

"In effect your time ends up being very reactive and managed by email."

Flowmation

Zone quickly understood that they needed a robust system just to cope. That's when they brought in Flowmation. As Sue explains, "We had been working with Silicon Systems for a while and Flowmation seemed to fit the bill perfectly."

"One of the main benefits of Flowmation is that it centralises everything," says Sue. "You place the PDF you want approving in a folder and then it gets published. We can alert everyone who needs to know and they can all come in and see what the current status is, comment and approve."

"Flowmation also gives us oversight on the whole operation. Usually we go in at 9.00 or 9.30 each morning and get a clear picture of what needs to be organised for the day."

Sue concludes, "Flowmation has enabled us to use resources we would have been devoting to tracking and managing email to growing the business. We must be 100% more efficient than we were."

The Future

Looking ahead, Zone's impressive progress continues. Carlsberg are the latest high profile client who Zone are working for. As Sue explains "We are getting upgraded to the latest version of Flowmation and Carlsberg will be the first new client to use it."

Zone have certainly been ahead of the curve in terms of their adoption of new technology. Combine this with the creative talent of the team and it's no wonder that Zone have made such impressive headway in such a short time.