Dreyer's Manages Marketing Operations

Dreyer's, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Nestle, manufactures and distributes a full spectrum of ice cream and frozen desert products. The company's premium products are marketed under the Dreyer's brand name throughout the western states and Texas, and under the Edy's brand name throughout the remainder of the United States.

In 1994, Dreyer's became the No. 1 packaged ice cream in the United States. It had the largest market share in the premium ice cream category, and overseas sales had tripled. Dreyer's ice cream was selling in regions across South East Asia and the Caribbean. Dreyer's Grand Ice Cream Inc. then combined its operations with Nestle's U.S. frozen dessert business in 1995.

Rapid growth due to acquisition of other brands, creation of new products and distribution across multiple geographical regions created marketing challenges for the company. To market multiple brands of snacks, premium ice creams and super premium ice creams across the globe, the organization needed to create and manage a significantly increased number of product images and catalogs, packaging graphics, point-of-sale (POS) materials and promotional literature.

It was very difficult to share this information using manual methods among different marketing and new product groups, resulting in poor communications and repeated artwork redesigns. In addition, the process to create the images for package production was extremely manual, and things were beginning to fall through the cracks.

Moving to Automation

The company realized that it needed to automate the aforementioned manual processes and began to look for the solution. After a careful evaluation of various solutions in the market, Dreyer's selected the Assetlink Marketing Operations Management (MOM) solution to streamline and automate its marketing operations. The initial focus was in two areas:

• Deploy a central repository to manage all the marketing related digital content
  
• Streamline and automate the marketing process related to packaging production

Since deployment, the solution has helped Dreyer's to achieve these benefits and significantly reduce the elapsed time and costs involved in managing these activities. Here is a run down of how the Dreyer's marketing operation works today:

Streamlined Marketing Asset Management: Dreyer's uses the solution to organize digital content related to graphics, brochures, advertising and various communications resources in a centralized, secure repository. This capability is enabled by a Digital Asset Manager module.

Marketing communications managers can easily add new digital assets to the repository or delete old assets from it. Authorized employees and business partners in various locations can find the digital asset they are looking for in the repository by either navigating the organizational hierarchy or specifying search criteria. Once they find the asset, they can download it for use in their marketing program. The solution provides the flexibility for the administrator to specify different security policies for different sections of information or different users.

The centralized marketing asset repository has greatly improved the sharing of marketing assets and has encouraged the reuse of marketing assets. This has resulted in consistency, eliminated shipping and handling costs, and reduced agency fees.

The solution also generates several useful reports displaying the usage of marketing assets. This helps to track the usage and calculate cost savings and ROI.

Personalized Access: Dreyer's uses the solution to provide its marketing users with a consistent, single point of access to disparate marketing content and other information sources to the end users through the metaphor of "channels". A channel provides a uniform mechanism to select and display content on the user's browser screen. Users can choose the channel, specify the channel layout on their portal page, and easily add new channels or delete existing channels they access.

The channels have enabled the user to reduce the information clutter on the system and provide them with only the information they are interested in. A Marketing Dashboard module enables this channel capability.

Automated Marketing Processes: Dreyer's uses the solution to define, streamline and automate the end-to-end marketing processes that are related to packaging.

A marketing manager can initiate a request for a new project by submitting a design brief form in their MOM system. The design brief enables consistent and efficient communication between the requestor and the project manager, and eliminates ad hoc trickling of information in the form of e-mails and one-on-one discussions.

Once the new project is initiated, the project manager routes a special form to gather information related to all the packaging components, ensuring that the information is gathered in a comprehensive manner and automates the follow up with contributors who have not supplied information in a desired timeframe.

On receiving all the information, the project manager routes the collected information to the initial contributors to verify the accuracy and then forwards the packaging information to the graphics designer who creates the artwork mechanical.

Once the artwork is completed, the project manager then routes it to appropriate reviewers. The reviewers download the PDF file and annotate their comments. The system automatically follows up with reviewers who do not respond within the desired time frames and keeps track of the various revisions of the approvals document.

On receiving the approval for the artwork mechanical, the project manager requests the designer to release the artwork to the separator. The designer uses the system to enable the separator to download the mechanical artwork. The separator performs several pre-press steps such as scanning high-resolution images, color correction, replacing low-resolution images with high resolution, trapping, etc.

On completing the pre-press steps, the separator sends a PDF of the resulting artwork to the project manager for approval. On receiving the final approval for the artwork, the project manager requests the separator to release films to the printer, upload the final artwork to the MOM system and send notification to plants that the artwork is ready for use.

This streamlined automation has reduced the risk of tasks falling through the cracks and has increased the effectiveness and efficiency of the entire process. The capability is enabled by a Workflow Manager module.

In 2007 alone, more than 2,500 workflow transactions passed through the system.

According to Virginia Sanchez, director creative services of Dreyer's Grand Ice Cream, "Without the Assetlink MOM system, it would take four project coordinators instead of two to process the transactions. This has resulted in annual cost savings of more than $200,000. In addition, we had 12,000 artwork downloads performed by a variety users. At standard agency costs of $250 for sending artwork, this capability within Assetlink provided an additional annual saving of about $3 million to our organization."