Published on November 11, 2024, in if.team cases
Hanna Pichkur
Copywriter, if.team
Oleh Frolov
CEO, if.team
Burdened by projects, creators long for burden-free interfaces! In any case, this slogan could accurately describe the needs of the Diez agency. The simplicity of the future ERP solution had to contribute to the effective management of the creative team — the main users of the application and the driving force behind the advertising production agency that creates trends and promotes brands.
To achieve this, the company was looking for a single platform that would provide a comfortable environment for creative people to collaborate, as well as comprehensive, predictive business analytics to make informed management decisions.
One tool instead of a thousand tabs, one dashboard instead of a bunch of boring spreadsheets, and a year of successful use of all these features by the Diez agency team. Find out first-hand how if.team helps manage projects in the creative industry, why the advertising production agency chose the Ukrainian solution over the Belgian odoo, and what impact it has had on the current functionality of the ERP system this year (spoiler alert: enormously).
Niche:: digital marketing and content production
Company size: 7 people
Time of using if.team: 1 year
Diez Agency is a Kyiv-based full-service advertising agency that provides creative promotion of brands – companies and individuals. The team has been working successfully in the digital market since 2011, and since December 2023 it has been doing so even more effectively with the if.team online service.
The creative team of 7 specialists offers turnkey production and promotion of media content – from the idea to the evaluation of the effectiveness of each advertising campaign and video. There are a lot of challenges in implementing a brand’s marketing strategy. And there are many brands that a small agency promotes. The if.team ERP system helps them meet the needs of all their clients and their customers.
In the end, they found a simple solution that allowed the team to work productively while giving them room to be creative. Not surprisingly, it was the Diez agency team that became the driving force behind major if.team updates, including flexible fields within the interface. The customisation function has opened up new possibilities for adapting the system to the specific needs of not only an advertising production agency, but also any project business. But more on that later.
The IT transformation of the Diez agency was preceded by a choice between two services – the Ukrainian startup if.team and the most installed Belgian software odoo. What helped if.team to win this seemingly uneven battle of systems? There were 3 main reasons:
1) User-friendly interface and easy onboarding. The company, which has more than 10 years’ experience in managing a creative team, is well aware that optimising business processes is first and foremost about people. Therefore, the first requirement when choosing an ERP system was a user-friendly interface that would facilitate effective and quick adaptation of employees to the new working tool.
In addition to a functional yet intuitive interface, if.team is built around the pain points of project management. That’s why, unlike the universal Odoo app, it’s best suited to the needs of service companies.
Overloaded with different modules, the Belgian system is a priori more difficult to implement, not to mention more difficult to adapt to the specific needs of the project business. Unlike odoo, the flexible if.team platform offers services for the development of additional features, custom modules and integrations. This is the second decisive factor in the choice of an ERP system for the management of the creative team at the Diez agency.
2) Quick and convenient access to technical support. Old-timers in the ERP market, such as odoo, often lose out when it comes to responding quickly to user requests. For small start-ups, however, prompt resolution of technical issues is an important opportunity for continuous product improvement, which also helps to build user confidence. In contrast to the multi-level organization of technical support in large companies, if.team is much simpler: when communicating with customers, the IT service is always just a click away.
I was impressed by the very quick contact with the team and the head of if.team.
— Alexander Kansler, Owner of Diez Agency
if.team’s responsive technical support has also become crucial for the Binary Future team, which develops Shopify websites. The Canadian company previously ran projects at ClickUp and migrated to us six months ago. You can read more about the process and results of implementing the if.team system at Binary Future in our business case.
3) Clear business intelligence at your fingertips. An important argument in favour of if.team for the owner of an advertising production agency was the financial side of the ERP system, which sets it apart from other project management services. It is a key set of tools that provides a complete financial picture not only of current projects (budget burn rate chart), but also of the entire company (interactive P&L and CashFlow reports).
The informative dashboards visualize the overall picture of both actual and planned income and expenses in real time on a single screen. From now on, the owner of the Diez agency doesn’t have to switch between accounting, analysis and management – if.team shows the state and trend of the finances in relation to other
So the advertising production agency abandoned its general ERP system odoo in favour of a solution designed specifically for project management needs. And it was a good decision. The team quickly integrated the service into their work and just as quickly brought the if.team developers on board.
Literally from the first product demonstration, the management team at Diez Agency has taken full advantage of the system’s customization capabilities. During the year of cooperation, if.team’s developers managed to receive and implement a long list of requirements, which today brings efficiency not only to the Diez agency, but also to dozens of other companies.
1) Integration with Google Calendar and Telegram: a feature that allows you to synchronise your if.team account with your calendar and messenger. Active Google users will be able to add if.team tasks to their calendars, and Telegram users will be able to receive notifications in the official messenger bot about any changes in their work projects.
2) The Gantt chart is an essential tool for project teams that value time. And who knows the value of every minute better than a production company? For media content creators, it is important not only to plan the schedule of the shooting day in detail, but also to have it at hand at all times.
Before meeting with Diez agency, the Gantt chart in the if.team system allowed us to plan work on a daily basis, but now it’s on an hourly basis. The chart, updated by the developers, now has a different way of displaying tasks, and the creative team has a convenient tool for planning and coordinating the work of everyone involved, not only in pre-production, but also on set.
Thanks to the integration of if.team mentioned above, the entire team can receive notifications about scheduled and recurring tasks in the calendar or in Messenger.
3) Flexible fields are a powerful feature that allows you to customize the if.team interface to meet the unique needs of your organisation, including media content production processes. Custom fields can contain different types of data: text, description, date, time, drop-down list, link, label, checkbox, number, etc. As a result, the system’s customisation capabilities are useful to many other if.team users, including the game development studio Play Fusion Labs, which we wrote about in our case study. The ability to create additional fields is currently available in tasks, but will be implemented in projects and if.team user profiles in the future.
4) Utm-labels: a CRM tool that allows you to evaluate the quality of leads from different traffic sources (Facebook, Instagram, Google Ads, etc.). This feature, which started as a simple suggestion from the marketing team at the Diez agency, is now available to all if.team corporate users. It helps to identify the most profitable channels for attracting potential customers, to allocate the advertising budget efficiently and to increase the return on investment.
Managing a creative team is always a balancing act between control and creative freedom. As a full-circle company, the Diez agency has been working in the digital market for a long time, so it devotes no less time to working with the experience of its employees. After all, the results and performance of the projects – the advertising campaigns and media products it creates – depend on the positive experience of the creative team, and thus on the success of the entire advertising production agency.
Employee experience is realized not only in the physical and cultural environment, but also in the technological environment, which is especially important for remote workers. That’s why the experience of a company’s employees largely depends on the experience of using the system implemented in that company. That’s why the Diez agency has been looking for a solution for a long time that is not a tool of repression that complicates the life of the team, but an assistant that allows them to free up time for creative tasks and to see their place in the project and the company.
With an ERP solution from if.team, it’s easy for the marketing team at Diez Agency to realise their creative potential and drive projects forward. Operational efficiency and a complete financial picture of the business gives the manager valuable analytics and more time for what really matters – strategic planning and increasing competitiveness in the changing landscape of digital advertising.
In return, the Diez agency’s extensive experience of working with projects for over 10 years provides high-quality feedback and valuable ideas for improving if.team, which our developers are happy to implement. The result is a win-win situation – the most useful product for managing talented project teams.
Tired of chaotic project management and not knowing where your time and money is being spent?
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