Nordstrom connects critical applications using Adobe Workfront.

Leading fashion retailer bridges the gap between Adobe Workfront for marketing work management and ServiceNow for customer support, boosting productivity.

Seattle, Washington

www.nordstrom.com

Redirecting time savings to higher-value work

Products:

Adobe Workfront ›

Objectives

Consolidate disparate marketing applications

Eliminate duplicate manual processes

Meet continually changing marketing needs

Results

Redirecting time savings to higher-value work

Eliminating redundant work, increasing productivity

Reducing manual processes

Supporting code-free integration

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For more than a century, leading fashion retailer Nordstrom has been committed to providing customers with the best possible service and to improving it every day — in stores and online. The company's customer-first culture extends both from and into its Seattle headquarters where employees use technology to work faster and smarter.

The challenge

The competitive retail industry requires Nordstrom to support a variety of applications and technologies, some developed in-house and others available commercially. As Nordstrom marketing teams move through seasonal campaigns from Valentine’s Day to Father’s Day to Black Friday, new marketing technologies such as Adobe Workfront are being utilized to deliver customer-centric, personalized content while streamlining how work gets done.

For example, Workfront helps standardize and centralize the way Nordstrom manages marketing projects, collaborates, reviews communications, views and extracts cost data, and more.

With employee adoption of Workfront rising, Nordstrom began looking for ways to continue to use the many creative solutions they need, yet connect to others through automation. The team also wanted to consolidate the number of applications marketers needed while still providing the benefits of all of them.

Two large development teams — one in enterprise IT, the other in marketing — keep Nordstrom innovative and operationally efficient. Yet reporting an issue with one of the many technologies marketers use during their work days required employees to leave Workfront and send an email to marketing IT professionals who, in turn, would communicate with enterprise IT for resolution.

Similarly, marketers regularly generating IDs for digital content using Nordstrom’s custom tagging application would have to interrupt their projects in Workfront up to 10 minutes a day across 300 projects a week, to complete a separate project form in the open-ended relational database, which made processes inefficient.

Today, Nordstrom uses Workfront to standardize marketing requests in a repeatable and quantifiable way.

The Workfront solution

Nordstrom began piloting the Workfront Fusion integration platform to gain a seamless way of connecting data and processes between Workfront and other systems within the company’s enterprise technology environment. Workfront gives the retailer greater flexibility in achieving its core value of exceptional customer service to the company’s thousands of marketing professionals.

Workfront and ServiceNow integration

Workfront Fusion is helping to bridge Nordstrom’s marketing work management and customer support solutions. IT and marketing technology operations are collaborating to connect ServiceNow, which marketers use for issue reporting, to workflows in Workfront in an effort to enable data transfer and reporting that will give the company visibility into all costs associated with the production of marketing content. With Workfront and ServiceNow integration, opportunities to provide updates back into the tool marketers may be having issues with are now a possibility.

Workfront and LinkGen integration

The integration capabilities of Workfront Fusion has firmly secured Workfront as an integral part of Nordstrom's marketing technology stack. As a result, the retailer can use the work management system to further advance automation capabilities.

With Workfront, marketers have complete project visibility and the data to pivot quickly.

Benefits

Today, Nordstrom uses Workfront to standardize marketing requests in a repeatable and quantifiable way that enables the company to better understand content production effort and cost. Teams rely on project management, collaboration, and online proofing capabilities in the work management solution to complete tasks and reviews without meetings. And with Workfront Fusion, marketers have complete project visibility and the data to pivot quickly. Now with Workfront, off-the-shelf and custom solutions at Nordstrom supporting the making or planning of marketing content can flow into or out of Workfront through seamless code-free, integration for more flexibility in meeting changing business demands.

Workfront helps Nordstrom:

Redirect time savings to higher-value work By seamlessly connecting Workfront and ServiceNow, Workfront Fusion helps free the marketing technology operations team from administrative tasks. Marketing technology operations estimates it responds to approximately 20 requests a week and that Workfront can save staff up to 10 minutes per request, for a total of more than three hours of administrative work a week, or about 175 hours a year.
Eliminating redundant work, increasing productivity Marketers no longer have to complete two project creation forms (one in Workfront, another in LinkGen) because of automation.
Reducing manual processes Workfront is Nordstrom marketing’s system of record for procedures and the source of operational data for project management, reviews, and communication.
Supporting code-free integration While keeping enterprise IT informed, marketing has been able to integrate Workfront with ServiceNow and LinkGen without additional IT resources or code.