Brown Shoe Company - Customer Case Study

Situation “Five years ago we were presented with a good problem — business was growing across Brown Shoe’s multiple brands and markets. The marketing team needed a tool to better track and share creative work being developed for wide range of retail, wholesale and online channels. Like many large creative organizations, we needed to find a tool that would balance the need to manage a large volume of projects with an interface that would be easy for our designers and reviewers to adopt. After careful review of our options, we chose WorkZone – it was the best choice for our team.” Problem to be solved Manage more than 200 active projects across 15 brands and 100 contributors. Additionally, we needed an easy way to share the creative assets being developed for review, comment and approval, as email is not an efficient method when hundreds of files are in development. Action WorkZone was implemented in January 2008 as a project collaboration tool for the entire marketing team at Brown Shoe. We continue to use WorkZone to track projects from the smallest banner updates to our largest new campaigns. Results “Like most in-house creative teams, we are constantly challenged by our internal clients. Before WorkZone, we struggled with countless emails, phone calls and frustrations as our clients didn’t understand how their delays and revisions affected our team’s ability to get quality work done on time. WorkZone gives all Brown Shoe stakeholders visibility to the work our team is managing. It keeps us on track and allows us to remind individuals of tasks and approvals automatically. We are able to accomplish more today with the same resources than we were ever able to do before implementing WorkZone. The numbers speak for themselves. In the past four years we have successfully tracked over 8,000 projects and more than 10,000 files through our creative review process in WorkZone. It’s hard to calculate the exact return we’ve gotten from WorkZone, but it’s easy to say we get at least several times the cost savings (in employee efficiency) that we spend for WorkZone on a monthly basis.”