Week 3 - A Week by Week Introspective on How The Branding Spot Will Use WorkXpress to Transform a Client's Business Operations
by jburns
The Branding Spot is an Arizona based company that handles branded products and marketing for companies nationwide. Recently, Brett Kaufman, CEO of The Branding Spot, signed a contract with WorkXpress to completely reengineer the back-end process for one of the leading Experiential Marketing firms in the country. With a new method of talent tracking and event allocation management they will be able to utilize a potential 70+% increase in productivity through software automation over previous hand processes.
Follow along over the 5-week build cycle to learn more about how WorkXpress builds and deploys mission critical business applications.
With the end of Week 3, The Branding Spot’s customized software is now really beginning to take solid form. The project is still slightly ahead of schedule, which has allowed Brett Kaufman of The Branding Spot to add a few additional aspects of functionality while maintaining their tight spending budget.
“On budget and on time, that’s something not usually heard around the implementation of an entirely new and customized software build,” said Kaufman. “I’ve been very happy with the progress so far and am already thinking of 100 additional things we could add in the coming months after this initial sequence is complete. The level of software capability we’re getting is pretty amazing considering our budget.”
The number of items completed during the week by the assigned WorkXpress account manager and builder, Noah Coburn, was substantial. The biggest accomplishment was the finalized talent invitation functionality, which allows talent to easily respond to event work requests.
Noah said, “I didn’t write a single line of code to create this application. Everything I’ve done in the 5GL WorkXpress platform as a service has been a series of using the five tools and building blocks to create complex functionality like this talent invitation functionality. With it, The Branding Spot will be able to easily send a request to desired event worker candidates, allow candidates to easily respond, and then, on the home side, sort the “yes’s” based on client requests. When we spoke about this with The Branding Spot, Brett mentioned that until now they’ve had to literally e-mail 1000 people, then manually attempt to go through the 700 responses. As you can imagine, this was not only time consuming, but, also, unlikely to net the best possible talent.”
Kaufman said, “It was a nightmare to arrange talent. Beyond the hundreds of spreadsheet tabs opened to manage events, we would then also have 700 e-mail responses to read. There was no good way to sort them until now. Now, we’ll be able to see a photo of the person and sort responses by the characteristics that matter to our clients. Then, when we select the right talent for the job, response and reminders are automated. This is a very BIG win for our company.”
Noah also built functionality for The Branding Spot to add group leaders to specific events. The event leader would then have access to their “team” of employees to manage them appropriately.
“By allowing for group leaders to be used and have access, we’ll cut down on organizational mess and paperwork. With this and the coming ability to handle all timesheet input via the web, we’re going to bring our company into the 21st century. In fact, we’ll now be asking talent to have a data accessible phone, like an iPhone, so that they can be in touch with event needs and reporting from anywhere,’ continued Kaufman.
Week 4 will continue the extension of functionality within timesheets to give group leaders and individual talent direct access to their post event reporting via the web.
Stay tuned to weekly updates on the progress and final implementation of the The Branding Spot’s customized software platform in the WorkXpress PaaS.
