How Blue Yonder leverages Wrike dashboards to power complex marketing workflows

Blue Yonder is a global digital supply chain provider that employs almost 8,000 associates in more than 35 offices worldwide. Retailers, manufacturers, and logistics service providers rely on Blue Yonder to optimize and accelerate their supply chains from planning through fulfillment, delivery, and returns. 

Bringing the marketing team into one platform fit for purpose

The marketing team at Blue Yonder was struggling with a common problem: low visibility in their workflows. They had used Workamajig for nine years, but found that the tool was primarily geared toward marketing agencies and didn’t suit their needs. Additionally, it was a heavily text- and Excel-based tool, which didn’t work for a visually driven marketing team dealing with large-scale asset creation. The department needed something far more visual, adaptable, and easy to use.

The Blue Yonder team also realized that not having the entire marketing team able to work within the same tool was crippling their productivity. Project manager Jessica Bargenquast explained, “We identified a need for a tool that could serve marketing as a whole.” 

PT Umphress, Global Director of Digital Marketing Operations, elaborated on the limited visibility issue: “You couldn’t see the full workflow. You’d only see just your piece of it.” Unfortunately, that also required a lot of manual notification, task updating, and status changing from the project managers. “They were in full-time cat-herding mode of literally everything that the creative team or the digital team were touching or doing which was not the most efficient, effective way to work.” 

The team’s existing software also didn’t allow stakeholders or requestors to access project information, requiring manual status updates that cost everyone valuable time.  Wayland Fox, senior marketing director at Blue Yonder, recalled that with Workamajig, he’d have to reach out to project managers to determine the status of projects. “We needed the transparency to see the status of something that was submitted.”

Increasing visibility with dashboards and phased change management

PT was able to recommend Wrike after having implemented it in previous roles at other companies. “I knew that with Wrike, it’s much more visual and interactive creatively.” He predicted that their busy marketing team would benefit from the high visibility and visual interface in Wrike. “I already knew we could do better and make everyone’s life a little bit easier.” 

When the Blue Yonder marketing team was making the decision between various project management tools, they made a side-by-side comparison of a range of options. “It got to the point that we had to tell people, if Wrike can’t do it, no tool is going to be able to do it,” PT said. “We went with Wrike because we have needs that these other tools aren’t flexible enough to allow for, and as marketers, it has creative and collaboration capabilities with a clean UX that’s intuitive enough to work for creative, non-technical types.” 

Blue Yonder started with 125 Wrike licenses, and has grown to expand beyond the marketing team to include the legal, renewals, and revenue operations teams as well. But change didn’t happen overnight. “We had about 60 days to decommission our old tool and build out Wrike for our entire marketing department,” Jessica explained. “It was a feat, but we did it, and we’re still building upon it every day.” 

They used a two-phase change management approach. “Step one was to recreate the fundamentals of Workamajig inside Wrike,” PT explained. They created semi-equivalent request forms that would allow marketers who were using the previous tool to make an easy switch over. “We could reassure people that the request forms still exist, they’re actually better and they now kick off projects based on blueprints.”

Phase two involved working directly with the project management functional teams and stakeholders to find out what they do repeatedly to create standardized workflows. “I’d say, talk to me about turnaround time, expectations, and dependencies for your most common projects,” said PT. After setting up those initial workflows, the marketing team has evolved its use of Wrike’s highly visual feature to manage capacity and assign tasks based on user skill sets.

Creating radical transparency and a culture of process standardization

Adopting Wrike and building a dashboard and blueprint system that gives full transparency to everyone on the team has increased visibility into the Blue Yonder team’s projects, from designers to project managers to executive leaders. 

Wayland explained that using a range of dashboards allows him to show Blue Yonder executives more clearly the issues they’re facing. “We could use a dashboard to show everything we have lined up for the next 30 days to show a picture of the timeframe where we knew we were being overloaded,” he explained. “Leaders come to us and ask for more information — because they know that we can slice and dice our dashboards to give them what they need.” 

Making the move to Wrike has also enabled Blue Yonder’s marketing team to begin conversations about standardizing processes that could capitalize on repeatability to drive efficiency. “We’re now driving this motion of it shouldn’t matter which team you’re on or what region you’re in, this is how we do it and this is how long it takes,” PT explained. Blue Yonder has tied their Wrike dashboards directly into blueprints to further solidify the company culture of standardization. “Blueprints give a recipe so everyone knows that every time you start something, you need these ingredients.”