Managing complex design workflows.
Essity makes content creation management more efficient to meet increasing demands using Adobe Workfront.
70
Projects and thousands of assets delivered in six months
Products:
Objectives
Formalise content creation workflow across global teams with clear processes and standardised framework
Significantly improve efficiency of content creation with integrations and automation, with rapid time to value
Handle the full content creation process in one organised solution, including visual asset reviews
Extend value of content creation management to design and marketing teams across the company
Results
Completed 70 projects and delivered thousands of assets in six months
Automated ingestion of request information saving up to 15% of project time
Reduce time to clarify requests and feedback from weeks to minutes
Capture all stakeholder feedback in one online location for improved accuracy and less rework
Combine “essentials” and “necessities” and what do you get? Essity, a leading global hygiene and health company. The company focuses on creating sustainable hygiene and health solutions sold to businesses and individuals worldwide through dozens of popular brands such as Tork, TENA, Bodyform, Libresse, and Tempo.
With brands sold in over 150 countries, business units company-wide work with teams of designers to create all of the content assets needed for websites, marketing campaigns, and other displays for Essity and its retailers. To win the digital shopper and accelerate e-commerce, the graphic design team for the consumer goods division expanded, but still had difficulty keeping up with demand.
Mihail Marinov, Shopper Content Manager at Essity, explains that with designers having so much work, the team needed to find ways to work more efficiently. “Designers have to complete projects and move on to the next one as quickly as possible,” explains Marinov. “We don’t have the resources to have designers spending time recreating assets or continually reopening projects to make adjustments.”
The most time-consuming parts of content creation tended to be organizational. Designers needed to wait for requesters to deliver all of the relevant information, which could sometimes take days of back-and-forth communication. All stakeholders needed to offer feedback and approve final content. But much of this essential communication took place piecemeal across emails and chat without formal governance or structure. The result was duplication, overtime, and endless rounds of review.
Essity began looking at systems that could help manage complex design workflows from beginning to end. After a serious market analysis across various solutions, Essity chose Adobe Workfront for its ability to harmonize all processes associated with content creation right out of the box.
“We liked that Adobe Workfront natively excels at harmonizing content creation workflows for remote teams,” says Marinov. “It has the capabilities to add clarity and efficiency to very complex design processes.”
“Adobe Workfront enables us to work smarter and create a direct line of communication with all stakeholders.”
Mihail Marinov
Shopper Content Manager, Essity
Formalising the content creation workflow
Before implementing Adobe Workfront, the content creation process was managed very informally. Without a standardised framework the process was described as not reliable. When someone needed new assets, such as hero images for a new marketing campaign, they would alert their project manager who would simply email or send a chat message to a designer explaining what was needed. Typically, designers would have to go back to the project manager several times to clarify the request. How many variations of assets were needed? Who should be involved in the approval process? Where would the completed images be stored?
With Adobe Workfront, Essity can formalise these interactions in one location. People fill out a request form that contains all of the required information for a project. After receiving the request, designers can start on the project right away without spending precious time confirming details. When the first draft is complete, designers use Workfront to push the content out to all stakeholders for review. The online proofing and approval capabilities in Adobe Workfront create a single location to capture all comments and approvals.
“Many project management solutions do not allow reviewers to write directly on visuals, which leads to less accurate feedback and more time spent redoing content,” says Marinov. “Adobe Workfront enables us to work smarter and create a direct line of communication with all stakeholders. Designers might have previously spent weeks clarifying requests and feedback, but with Adobe Workfront, it’s handled in minutes.”
The design team can also use Adobe Workfront to monitor requests and track content creation speed. When teams request similar content, designers can push back and ask whether existing content can instead be repurposed. If there are challenges in a project, designers can look at logs to determine where delays occurred and find ways to avoid similar issues in the future. The new approach provides greater predictability and clarity and enables the Essity Content Factory to deliver more output for the same budget.
“We have six major creative processes running through Adobe Workfront so far, and in the first six months we completed 70 projects and delivered thousands of assets,” says Mathieu Blaise, Global Digital Services & Marketing Content Director at Essity. “It’s night and day compared to the way we used to work. We now have over 150 customer and brand marketers from teams around the world actively using one platform to manage content creation. The biggest benefit of Adobe Workfront is our potential to scale our creative processes to all teams across Essity and further improve efficiencies across the company.
Maximising benefitswith integrations and automation
While Essity could start using Adobe Workfront out of the box, by taking advantage of integrations, the company creates even more efficiencies for design teams. When requesting content, requesters must fill out an Excel sheet to capture all of the details required for a project. That essential data is now pulled directly into the Adobe Workfront project file via Adobe Workfront Fusion.
“Designers previously spent up to 15% of the project time entering information manually,” says Blaise. “By automating that step with Adobe Workfront Fusion, we’re improving speed and accuracy while allowing designers to get started on projects faster.”
Another integration automatically pushes finished content directly into the digital asset management system, even adding essential tags without needing designer intervention. While Essity is not yet taking advantage of the native integration with Adobe Creative Cloud, designers look forward to handling content creation and reviews entirely through their Creative Cloud apps.
“We don’t intend to invest in integrating and automating every process, but we are on the lookout for frequent or time-consuming tasks where we can lighten the load by taking advantage of Adobe Workfront integrations with Creative Cloud and other solutions,” says Blaise.
“Working with Adobe Workfront, we gain flexibility within a framework that benefits all of our creative teams.”
Mathieu Blaise
Global Digital Services & Marketing Content Director, Essity
Adopting a flexible rollout to address diverse needs
While many teams across Essity could benefit from the general project management capabilities of Adobe Workfront, Essity is focusing on refining processes and expanding use of Workfront as a content creation management solution. During the proof of concept, the Workfront professional services team worked closely with Essity to identify the most important capabilities for creative workflows.
Interest in Adobe Workfront is increasing with design teams across the company. Rather than setting a strict implementation schedule, Essity is adopting an agile rollout method based on need. When teams are ready to make the switch to Adobe Workfront, they simply attend a relevant training session, which are held every two weeks, to learn necessary skills. Adobe Workfront is then immediately rolled out to that team. The ease of training and ability for the Adobe Workfront platform to address acute pain points accelerates rollout and adoption.
“We had a great experience working with the Adobe Workfront professional services team," says Blaise. “They helped us disrupt our existing, manual approach to content creation and identify the key process issues that we needed to solve. And they’ve enabled us to take ownership of the platform. Working with Adobe Workfront, we gain flexibility within a framework that benefits all of our creative teams.”
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