How Astute Review Saved Employees at Berkeley Research Group 60% of Their Time Building Client Deliverables
95% of organizations have branding guidelines, but only 25% have formal guidelines that are consistently enforced.
Brand consistency can increase revenue from 10% to more than 20%.
According to 77% of organizations, materials
not conforming to brand guidelines are always, often, or sometimes created.
54% of U.S. office workers waste time searching for files and documents than doing actual work.
57% of organizations consider the ability to quickly find files and documents as one of the top three problems to solve in 2021.
Teams lose 236 hours per year on
duplicated work.
On average, knowledge workers spend 50% of their time creating and preparing documents.
Companies introduce and enforce brand guidelines for a reason.
They spend precious hours — even big money — working with creatives and branding experts to create a brand that resonates with target audiences. The right blend of branding elements — logo, colors, images, fonts, templates and tone of voice — help you tell your story in an instant, connect with like-minded audiences, and set your company apart from the competition.
With consistency, your brand becomes easily recognizable and your message more distinct and powerful.
But therein lies the problem.
In organizations with a large number of content contributors, how do you ensure everyone works efficiently and the way you want them to from a branding and compliance perspective? With tight deadlines and varying abilities among employees, how do companies align employees and managers to produce better business content faster, while maintaining the brand you worked so hard to build?
Berkeley Research Group (BRG) is a global consulting firm that provides valuable advice helping top organizations stay ahead in three key areas: corporate finance, disputes and investigations, and performance improvement and strategy.
BRG was named by Forbes as one of America’s Best Management Consulting Firms and ranked by Global Arbitration Review (GAR) as sixth in the world in international arbitration in 2021. This company works with organizations across a range of industries, including construction, healthcare, energy and climate, financial services, government contracts, and higher education.
BRG’s Healthcare Performance Improvement (HPI) team works with healthcare providers to pinpoint areas for improvement and implement operational strategies that have, over the past decade, resulted in cost savings of nearly $1 billion for their clients.
These clients come to BRG for their track record. But they judge BRG not just by their knowledge and expertise but also by the quality of the materials they create and deliver.
Working on endless slides and maintaining consistent marketing materials across an organization is a challenge. In a perfect world, every aspect of a pitch would have a proper marketing review, but given the volume of client deliverables created on a daily basis, this is not a practical solution.
Instead of focusing more on messaging and content, the BRG team, including its senior leadership, was spending countless hours formatting and reviewing presentations, making sure they were professional-looking and consistently on-brand.
BRG brought in Astute Review, a software company focused on brand compliance and automation solutions to help.
Astute Review’s presentation automation tool was implemented to help the HPI team maximize the quality of their presentations and reports to clients, and save time while creating them.
By taking advantage of Astute Review, the Healthcare Performance Improvement team at BRG saw a significant increase in productivity and compliance rates.
Astute Review Solutions
* Presentation automation: Think Spellcheck, but for presentation formatting. Teams no longer have to review documents, slides, and other deliverables manually. Astute Review automates the entire review process for consistency. The tool automatically analyzes your presentations based on your company’s brand standards, and allows users to fi x mistakes in just one click.
* Asset library: Directly access all your firm approved templates, slides, images, icons and more directly in Microsoft Office. Workers spend on average 1.5 hours per day looking for up-to-date files. This inefficiency can mean a significant loss in productivity and brand compliance across an organization. Astute Review’s asset library readily integrates wherever your files are currently stored (SharePoint, DropBox, DAMs, etc.)
* Real-time brand monitoring: Your company’s brand is its most important asset and Astute Review is here to help marketing teams protect it. Astute Review helps monitor how employees are using your brand…wherever files are stored. In real-time Astute checks to make sure employees are using the most up-to-date logos, images, fonts, trademarks and more, giving marketers actionable analytics to further drive compliance.
BRG’s HPI team saw a 60% reduction in employee time consolidating slides, reviewing, editing, polishing, and finalizing presentations. 1 hour of presentation formatting is reduced to 24 minutes, while also eliminating human error. Astute Review helped HPI leadership focus more on research, content delivery, and meeting client expectations vs. formatting and reviewing junior employees’ work product. Employees are now incentivized to follow brand guidelines through their productivity gains.
“Astute helps ensure that all our deliverables are well-formatted and on-brand, allowing our teams to focus more on content and message delivery.”
– Jeff Hess, Partner at BRG
“Consolidating slides for an entire team to make a consistent presentation used to be a nightmare for us. Astute Review has helped me save countless hours formatting presentations by streamlining the process.”
– Eric Alexander, Consultant at BRG