As the Creative Services Director at Tropicana Entertainment, Michael Leon had a huge project in front of him.
He was tasked with creating the in-house advertising department to serve the 11 casinos and resorts under the umbrella of the popular and well known entertainment brand.
Knowing Workzone from a previous employer, Michael approached Workzone wondering if it could handle the volume, organization, and most importantly, the entire creative process from intake to delivery.
Their Needs
What does a Creative Director need to receive, process, and start 125 requests for projects every week?
Michael had three requirements that Workzone needed to excel at in order to make his newly formed department successful:
Be flexible
To Michael, flexibility meant that Workzone needed to be adaptable to his team’s needs in three distinct ways.
- Handle a high volume of requests. Serving 11 casinos and resorts comes with serving many projects. Streamlining work was at the top of his list.
- Michael needed the flexibility for an intake form to handle routine and strategic requests for projects like a bingo card for bingo night to large creative briefs for special events.
- Between receiving a high volume of requests and handling all types and sizes of requests, he needed to organize information quickly and accurately.
Easy to use
From clients to project managers, Michael explained that “everybody has their own technical level” and Workzone needed to work for users all with different skill levels with technology.
Great reporting
Michael relies heavily on reporting to see how many projects are active, what his team schedule can handle, and to report to his superiors.
Their Successes
Workzone exceeded his expectations.
“Workzone saves me at least an hour a day, easily,” Michael reported.
Handling Project Requests
One of Michael’s chief concerns was Workzone’s ability to handle project requests at both a high volume and be able to report on them. For many teams, weekly meetings surrounding project status is a waste of time. For Michael however, its not.
“Something that might take hours, you can literally have a quick 10, 15 minute meeting about,” Michael said.
Michael utilizes the request dashboard to monitor his daily intake. He described a process where he uses the column notes to give him a quick update on where the project stands.
Delivering Results
Michael was also proud to report that his team never missed a costly vendor deadline which translates to a 95%+ deadline achievement overall.
His clients are happy, his team is happy, and he is happy.
“I pull up our completed projects report and that justifies the cost by itself,” Michael said.
Michael also boasts that his team saved Tropicana $365,000 in annual operations costs, and completed over 20,000 projects. An often overlooked benefit to efficiency is the savings from not hiring additional staff to help traffic creative projects. When a system like Workzone is implemented correctly, the creative team moves at breakneck speeds.
Ease of use for his team
Interacting with so many internal clients and customers of his, Michael had to have Workzone be simple for clients but also his own team to pick up quickly.
Michael’s coworker Katie reports “It is very user friendly. Within a week I was able to figure it out”.
Workzone’s centralization on his team’s work meant that conversations around projects, tasks, and review and approval were all in one spot. Because it’s cloud based, Workzone could be accessed anywhere whether you have a PC or not.
“The markup features are very essential because not everybody has the capability to open up a PDF, let alone mark one up. They don’t have to worry about their platform, they can mark it up.”
