European airline: Unified solution streamlined marketing operations across 15+ branches
SENLA creates a consolidated set of marketing tools for a major European airline.
Navigating the turbulent skies
If you look at a modern aircraft's dashboard, you will see myriad gauges, buttons, and switches. Complex to an untrained eye, this dashboard can alert pilots to upcoming problems or inefficiencies, allowing for course-correcting and averting a potential crisis.
Compare this to the tools used by a marketing department of a global company: more often than not, it looks like a jigsaw puzzle made of pieces that don't fit and come from different sets. It’s usually a mess of solutions, processes, and workarounds.
When a Client in aviation approached us with a project to overhaul and streamline their marketing suite of tools that couldn't handle the company's impressive growth, we were thrilled.
“We had just a few weeks to go through mountains of technical and business documentation to create a rough prototype complete with business logic. It was a long marathon for our team. But we knew SENLA could help the Client's marketing team succeed: get rid of bottlenecks, consistently meet deadlines, and attract more customers. And that’s exactly what we did."
Airlines are not just regular companies — they operate under the constant scrutiny of government oversight, bureaucracy, and seasonal changes. This amps up the difficulty for their marketing departments, as not only do they have to adhere to a strict set of guidelines and standards, but also remain lean and agile to compete with other market players.
Our partnership with the airline began just before the COVID-19 pandemic started. The Client realized that to survive under the new, sometimes disastrous regulations, they had to adapt and act fast by giving their employees the best tools to do their jobs.
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Defining the project scope
The scope of the project was somewhat overwhelming: the airline had more than a dozen marketing departments scattered across the country, each using its own processes and procedures. The goal was to create a unified system for all the departments to act as one, delivering on time and being able to support distributed teams and outside partners.
We suggested adopting a micro frontend approach for building the system. This would allow our Client to implement parts of the solution gradually and ease transition pains for their employees.
Our solution consisted of the following modules:
Process constructor
Task-tracker
Creative storage
Notification system
Dynamic reporting
Financial planning
POSM warehouse
Integrators
User management
Understanding the importance of UX
A beautiful instrument can inspire, unlock creativity, and increase productivity. That’s why top companies spend billions of dollars making sure their products are polished and easy to use.
After working with multiple systems without a consistent visual language for years, our Client’s employees yearned for a beautiful, simple solution that would make their everyday lives easier. We spent hours collaborating with project managers and marketing specialists to understand how these teams work best, listened to their requests, and tried to implement them into our UX/UI design.
“We wanted to lower the amount of tedious and repetitive work every person has to endure so they can focus on actually doing their best work. We really liked that SENLA’s designers and UX specialists listened to what we wanted and helped us achieve our vision.”
Bringing data to the front
When you have more than 15 marketing departments scattered across the continent, plus outside contractors and freelancers working together on multiple projects, a central repository with a single point of truth becomes of paramount importance.
Besides, marketing departments generate a heap of data that can be especially useful for planning and forecasting. Before the unified solution, this historical data was simply inaccessible.
To solve these problems, our data storage solution allowed for integrations with 3rd-party platforms, databases, and point of sales materials (POSM).
We also made sure that all the data aggregated during the campaigns could be dynamically parsed and presented in easy-to-understand dashboards to let managers make confident decisions fast. Team leaders were now able to spot any bottlenecks in human resources allocation, budgeting, or project management to meet set deadlines and minimize potential risks.
The value: Avoided bottlenecks, minimized risks
From specialists and external contractors to top management, the new system invigorated and energized the entire marketing team and the company as a whole. These are the top three wins from various stakeholders our Client shared with us after the system was fully implemented.
Top managers:
- Organized and more standardized project workflows.
- Quick and easy access to critical data to forecast future campaigns and minimize potential risks.
- Ability to segment and analyze project performance data to troubleshoot problems instantly.
Mid-level managers:
- Dashboards that let them gauge progress across teams and projects without manual effort.
- Ability to staff projects properly by quickly noticing members who are overwhelmed or underworked.
- Complete control over creative teams and vendors without countless emails.
Marketing specialists:
- Saving time to work on more important issues thanks to automation and simple and intuitive UI.
- Unified assets repository, which always stays up-to-date and allows editing of marketing materials with built-in tools.
- Much more streamlined in-house collaboration and synergy with outside contractors.
Technical specialists:
- Simple, reliable, and easy way to create backups of all the data.
- Dedicated admin controls to manage teams and individuals to ensure that everyone has access to the right information.
- Peace of mind with a secure and distributed file storage that can be replicated and archived.
And for SENLA it was a great possibility to realize our ultimate goal: driving success and profit for our Clients by delivering top-notch software solutions that transform businesses.