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Lowe & Partners
Lowe & Partners Worldwide commenced with The Works, an online DAM and creative collaboration website. They have recently extended VYRE Unify to run their global portal, which provides a point of integrated access to digital assets, knowledge and documents for the Lowe Group of agencies. They have recently undertaken a complete redesign of their portal.
Lowe Consolidates, Shares and Re-purposes Knowledge with VYRE Unify
Lowe & Partners Worldwide is a global advertising agency that has over 80 agencies in 54 different countries. In the late 90's and early part of this decade Lowe went through an aggressive merger and acquisition phase and this expansion presented a number of challenges to the network:
- Effective group communication and sharing of information
- Knowledge retention when personnel moved on
- The need to create and promote group cohesion and identity
- Increased efficiency and uniformity of common business / creative processes
- Effective resource planning on international projects
The creation of a collaborative portal has helped to address these concerns and support creative excellence across the Lowe Network. The portal, branded "Lowe Go" provides a virtual ‘desktop' for Lowe users, and supplies fast access to the information, people and business tools needed to add substantial business value.
"Lowe's business is about creativity, and brilliant work only happens when talent, ambition and focus come together in a collaborative culture. The rapid expansion of the group resulted in many agencies using different IT systems which did not communicate with other agencies or management. Lowe Go has delivered increased efficiency, interaction and collaboration and now everyone feels part of the Lowe network."
Drew Murdoch, Lowe & Partners Worldwide, Lowe Go Project Manager
Awards
The portal has truly dispelled the belief that intranets are little more than dumping grounds for information and has won best intranet at the British Computer Society Information Management awards in December 2006, as well as Most Effective Use of IT in Professional Services, and Most Effective Use of Information at The Information Age Effective IT Awards in June 2007.
Lowe Go: Key Objectives
- Reinforce brand identity
- To provide a virtual desktop for Lowe users, which provides fast access to collaborative tools, information, documents and people
- To develop an environment conducive to creative excellence and in support of innovation and growth
- To bring efficiency to labour intensive and costly business processes, such as the creation of video showreels
- To help solve key current technical issues, such as single sign on and need for standards based technology
- To share the burden of content creation and ownership and provide accountability throughout that process
By creating a collaborative community and transferring traditional business processes to an online environment "Lowe Go" is increasing performance across key business areas:
Knowledge Management
It was common for knowledge to be kept in personal folders or in users' mail files resulting in a loss of knowledge when employees left the agency. The Portal has allowed users to upload case studies and important documents to be used as reference when pitching and on other campaigns.
Knowledge Sharing
Before Lowe Go there was no easy way to share information and promote creative excellence across the group. Now Lowe share company news, industry news and promote creative excellence throughout the group. This increase in knowledge in turn provides increased accuracy in the business decision making process, and enables any one office to call on the resources and expertise of other people within the Lowe Network.
Generate and discuss ideas
The key aspect of the Portal is the ability to bring people of different communities (account management, planners, creative, finance etc) into one workplace to generate ideas and review new creative work. This helps account directors to gain an insight on how the new campaign is perceived and provides valuable information to a wider audience that was not possible before. For example, posting up the latest Nokia advert (from the DAM), then asking selected users for their feedback results in a more accurate business decision before the advert is previewed to the client. The results/feedback is kept and can be used for future campaigns (knowledge management).
Strategic Planning
The Portal enables strategic planners from across the network to collaborate in a common workplace headed by the Chief Strategic Officer (CSO). This allows strategic planners across the network to equip themselves with the right tools and knowledge to help improve the business process - from the problem identification stage to evaluating and optimising a campaign's success in the marketplace.
Agency Intranets
Management were not sure of individual agency contact details, latest work, facts and figures and clients across the network. The portal has created a virtual intranet for each agency (54 countries in total) that is centrally administrated in London and New York. This provides up to date information and brings together best practices and localisation data to the agency, which was previously difficult to get hold of.
Latest News and RSS Feeds
Network cohesion is increasing, as the Lowe community keeps up to date and shares client news, media intelligence, latest news from the network and from Lowe Management. RSS feeds bring back press releases from around the globe by accessing over 14,000 trusted websites and news feeds.
Digital Asset Management (DAM)
The old way of storing tapes was via u-matic tapes. These required dedicated tape desks to view and the tapes took up vast amounts of storage space. Lowe now manages over 90,000 adverts digitally via the portal. The DAM section of the portal also includes collaborative project areas to assist and streamline the creative process.
Real Time Editing
The use of a real time editing tool means that rather than asking creative services to manually create and edit a reel from a tape, burn to CD and post across the network, anyone can create showreels now using the portal.
"Prior to Lowe Go the creation of showreels was an offline process, which was both time intensive and costly, now anyone can create showreels with ease and the potential savings to the business are enough to justify the investment in VYRE Unify alone." said Drew Murdoch, Lowe & Partners Worldwide, Lowe Go Project Manager.
Global list of employees
Due to the different mail servers and locations of offices, Lowe had never had an accurate mailing list for all Lowe employees. As a result, news was often found out via press or the internet, as corporate messages were not received by all employees (certain agencies were missed out completely). Lowe now has a global consolidated LDAP user realm, which is updated on a regular basis and provides single sign on.
The Lowe Portal provides a common technology platform
One of the major benefits of the portal project was the ability of the portal to bring different agencies across the network together and overcome many group IT and communication issues. This was achieved through the VYRE Unify framework, which has delivered ease of content publishing across a global community of content contributors and integration to multiple LDAP realms and legacy systems. The consolidation of user realms and the provision of single sign on have enabled Lowe to better understand the expertise of the entire network, allowing people to search for skills and sector experience within the group. The integration of content sources and legacy systems has reduced duplication, increased content repurposing and collaboration. In addition, it has provided a consistent approach to sharing knowledge across the Lowe network.
