The world of consumer packaged goods is one that moves quickly. Companies that sell consumer packaged goods (CPG) have to constantly develop new products and get them into the hands of consumers at a regular rate. These products include non-durable goods such as food, toiletries, and other consumables. Because CPGs have generally short lifespans, that means the cycle of ideation to production is quick and involves people from a variety of roles all moving quickly together. For CPGs to see success, one thing these businesses have to focus on is their in-store display: does the product stand out on the shelf? Do the colors and design catch the consumer’s eye? The creative thought put into each CPG is crucial to a product’s ability to compete in the marketplace. With this in mind, one client came to us voicing their concerns about their existing creative workflow, with hopes that OneDesk might help them streamline and refine it.
Our client is a flexible packaging manufacturer. They are a well-established company with a creative team that supports the marketing department and works directly with customers to present designs, prototypes, and quotes for getting graphics into production. When the creative team was first established, they followed pre-processing workflows that had a number of shortcomings. In coming to us, our client was looking for ideas on how to rework their workflow in terms of managing their creative process.
Given that our client’s work revolves around visual art and design, they wanted to know what OneDesk offers in terms of file support. Our client intends on using OneDesk to manage incoming work requests, and so it is critical for them to be able to associate design files with each request. By default, OneDesk has no limit to what kind of file types we support. Our client can attach PDFs, PNGs, GIFs — there is no file type that we do not support as an attachment. This helps keep relevant information together, and is highly valuable for putting together proposals and finalizing designs.
At the heart of any management problem is organization, and having a strong structure that lends itself to extensibility and scalability. In terms of what OneDesk provides, this was an easy win. Although one of OneDesk’s main features is its project management tool, this structure of projects and work tasks is light and flexible. For our client, we advised them to use our concept of projects to encompass and represent their customers. A project in OneDesk is really just a grouping of tickets and/or tasks, and this is the ideal solution for separating and grouping incoming requests in a neat and tidy fashion. Because OneDesk offers management on the project level itself, our client is then able to manage and view their work at the customer level. For projects, we offer a variety of default views that show timelines, dependencies, and status. These views can be adapted and tailored to suit our client’s needs using filters and groupings. These views can then be used as a dashboard or exported as reports.
One area that is important to our client is billing and how much to bill their customers for work done. In order to calculate this value, our client needs to be able to track their estimation of cost is against each work item. With custom fields, OneDesk makes this easy. Our client can simply create a new custom field to capture estimated cost and assign it at a customer level. Leveraging our previous suggestion to set up one project per customer, we then advised our client to create their custom field for estimated cost at the project level. This allows our client to see this vital piece of information at their customer level without having to dive into particular work items. The custom field feature that OneDesk provides is flexible; there is no limit to how many custom fields our client can set up. On top of that, we offer a variety of different field types, from numbers to text to drop-down lists, which makes it easy to capture any kind of data.
Our client has many customers. This means that they see a large number of work requests come in on a regular basis. One of OneDesk’s most powerful features is workflow automation. This feature works hand in hand with the ability to create work tickets in OneDesk via e-mail. Our client highlighted that given the volume of requests they receive, lots of tickets would be created in OneDesk, needing to be sorted and moved into the appropriate project. However, using OneDesk’s workflow automations, our client can set up a rule so that any incoming work requests from particular e-mail address domains trigger an automation to route the request to a particular project. This keeps their work items organized from the very get-go.
Despite being predominantly focused on project management and helpdesk services, OneDesk can be configured to work for management uses beyond those two common cases. As our client experienced, there are many customizations that can be applied to OneDesk’s processes and systems to create the environment needed. For virtually any management problem, OneDesk provides a flexible framework that can then be adapted to suit the case at hand. On top of a breadth of already powerful features, this flexibility gives OneDesk the edge in any situation.