Are computers making your professional life easier and more efficient?
They are supposed to, of course, but when hundreds of people are filing and retrieving information about thousands of project components at once, computers are vulnerable to the same snafus and mishaps we experience with paper job files.
Duplicate files are often created. Digital folders are mislabeled. The wrong files can be updated or amended or deleted.
These sorts of calamities don't occur at McMurry, a full-service marketing services firm with offices in Phoenix, AZ and Saratoga Springs, NY. Among its other marketing services, the company produces a wide range of custom media titles for more than 235 corporate customers around the globe, with nearly 60 million copies produced annually. Even with the large number of titles being managed, employees at McMurry Saratoga office, who manage about 80 different titles, can immediately access the precise files they need on any aspect of any project. Virtual Ticket from MetaCommunications and its trademarked InterSync component marry file system documents at McMurry with important job information, allowing immediate access with accuracy and digital speed.
"It works beautifully and flawlessly," says Tracey Lenz, McMurry's Client Service Operations Manager. "Virtual Ticket has taken our file management capabilities to remarkable new levels. We use Virtual Ticket to create our folder structure for new contracts and to input new jobs onto our file server. When the folders are created, there are certain forms within Virtual Ticket that have file collector windows which will point to a specific job or contract folder. In the case of contracts, for example, the scanned image of the contract is saved there. One of our departments creates a budget for each job and that is stored in the contract folder also. Everyone can always go back to the contract, through the file collector window in Virtual Ticket, to see word for word what it says and what the budgets are. There is no room for error. The same relational capabilities are there for our job and production folders. "
Virtual Ticket gives us a tool set that we can build everything around - and that flexibility is very popular among the staff.
Saul Morse, Director of Information Technology
Saul Morse, McMurry's Chief Information Officer, says that the company initially compared Virtual Ticket to other packages on the market but none of them displayed the same versatility. "The packages we looked at," says Morse, "didn't have the complete range of Virtual Ticket. For example, many were not cross platform compatible for both Macs and PC's, which was one of our criteria for choosing the best option. We also needed a solution that we could easily customize to meet our specific needs. Virtual Ticket is very robust and integrates with most programs. It gives us a tool set that we can build everything around — that flexibility is very popular among the staff. And that flexibility was also extremely important with the recent acquisition by McMurry of Redspring Communications, helping us to more easily combine different workflows and technologies used by the two companies."
One example of customization performed by McMurry is the integration between Virtual Ticket and the company's accounting system. Lenz says, "Each job has billing memos that are imported into an invoicing worksheet that allows us to provide accounting with an accurate and real-time summary of all expenses associated with each issue of each publication." Lenz also reports that McMurry has built a custom approval tracking form within Virtual Ticket to ensure that color proofs from its print contractors are handled efficiently. Lenz adds, "Customizing Virtual Ticket is easy. I am a graphic designer by trade, and I am able to do a lot of the customization myself so that we can reflect the exact workflow that fits our business model. And when more complex customization is required, MetaCommunications staff has always responded promptly, not only making the changes to our instance of the software, but often adding our changes to the next general release for the benefit of the rest of its customer base."
All of this translates into big savings for McMurry. Lenz says, "It is probably safe to say that our designers each save about two hours a week using Virtual Ticket. Multiply that by the multiple designers we have on the system and you can see that the savings are quite impressive. Eighty percent of the staff, in a recent survey we conducted, said their productivity has substantially increased."
"What it really comes down to is scalability," adds Morse. "We are a company that has been growing rapidly. We have a lot of jobs for multiple clients being worked on at one time. It was becoming difficult to track all of the jobs and to keep track of our budget and visual information. What we saw with Virtual Ticket was an opportunity to build to the next level. It has allowed us to take on more clients while keeping the same quality of service. By centralizing all of our information we are literally all on the same page. "
What's next for McMurry? Lenz says, "We are looking forward to learning about new developments in Workgroups 2007. With the recent acquisition of Redspring Communications by McMurry, we have been focusing on integrating the two companies' systems. With that under our belt, it makes sense to take advantage of other Workgroups modules to make our growing operation even more efficient."
