In This Section:
CEI Architecture
Keystone Entertainment
M&R Environmental
Pharmaceutical Outcomes Programme
Rethink Advertising
Workspace
 

Our Clients: Rethink Advertising

When Oak Bay Softrends first sat down with Vancouver advertising firm Rethink, we recognized right away the opportunity we had to help the company handle growth.

It’s not that Rethink lacked a system. In fact, they had a very consistent, reliable one. They’d used it for several years. It worked like this:

“We used to have a master job book, and people who wanted to add a job would have to walk down to it and find it and add their new job in pen and walk back to their desk,” says Rethink’s Gail Budd, who co-ordinated the work we did with them.

The master book was part of a series of analog records and isolated computer files that had grown organically with the company. However, what had worked for 12 employees in 1999, wasn’t working for 50 employees in 2006.

So we studied in detail the processes that Rethink already had in place: time sheets, purchase orders, Excel spreadsheets and the like. Rethink wanted us to keep the look and the functionality of the old paper-based system, to smooth the staff’s transition to the new electronic system.

“If we could keep things looking and operating the same, we knew it would be an easier switch, and it has been,” Budd said.

With Rethink, we demonstrated that installing a system doesn’t have to be a disruption or a hassle; you can take the best of what’s already working, convert it to a digital process, and improve on it once it’s launched.

As the project neared completion, the system launched, and within 1 month after the system launched, more than half the company was already using it, which exceeded their own adoption goals.

We didn’t just launch it and leave it: We listened closely to the first users of the new system, tweaking and streamlining, saving steps and minimizing user error wherever possible.

So, was Rethink satisfied with the results of this “digital translation” of their previously analog management system?

Says Budd: “It’s increased our productivity tenfold, easily.”