Efficiency reports provide insight into historical performance in order to guide strategic decisions about the future. Common questions answered by these reports include the following:
How many campaigns did we deliver last year? How many resources were required? How many resources will be required to support next year’s planned volume of campaigns?
How did the team’s performance last quarter compare to previous quarters? Is creative throughput improving? Is the improvement because of increased headcount or is efficiency improving?
What is the average duration for this kind of project or task?
Why did a particular project take so much longer than other similar projects? Are there steps we can take to avoid a similar problem next time?
Is there data to prove that legal signoff is always delayed?
Who are the fastest and most productive members of the team?
Would on-time bonuses or delay penalties for agencies or freelancers make sense?
Is this latest rush request from management even possible? Have we ever completed a similar project in the requested timeframe? If not, can past data suggest a more achievable deadlines to set proper expectations now?
The answers to almost all of these questions can be found by tracking start time, stop times, and team member responsibility for each project task. In fact, these three simple data points are so powerful that even DAM implementations without near-term reporting requirements should consider capturing and storing the data from the initial deployment. The small effort to capture these data now enables a wealth of historical reporginreporting.
That entire section—efficiency reporting—may rankle creative professionals by failing to consider quality and creativity. The criticism is fair, but Creative Directors already have the means to judge quality. No designer or copywriter is going to get a gold star for churning out the greatest volume of putrid, derivative dreck in a given month. And if dreck did somehow get through the qualitative checks, the next section has a balancing quantitative metric.
Freedom Marketing's Monitoring gives you the ability to track these metrics out of the box.
Read more about DAM Reporting in these other blog posts: