McMurry

Virtual Ticket Improves Productivity for McMurry Custom Media Staff

McMurry

Location

Phoenix AZ and Saratoga Springs NY

Founded

1984

Clients

Fortune 500 companies including GE, Anthem, and Kaiser Ohio along with other Healthcare and Financial Services companies

Primary Work:

Full service marketing services company, including custom media publishing

McMurry is a marketing services firm with offices in Phoenix, AZ and Saratoga Springs, NY. Among its marketing services, the company produces a wide range of custom media titles for more than 235 corporate customers around the globe, with nearly 60 million copies produced annually. McMurry utilizes the capabilities of Workgroups and its trademarked InterSync component to marry file system documents with important job information. Even with the large number of titles being managed, employees at McMurry Saratoga office, who manage about 80 different titles, can immediately access the precise files they need on any aspect of any project using Workgroups.

"It works beautifully and flawlessly," says Tracey Lenz, McMurry's Database Administrator. "Workgroups has taken our file management capabilities to remarkable new levels. We use Workgroups' Virtual Ticket module to create our folder structure for new contracts and to input new jobs onto our file server. When the folders are created, there are certain forms within Virtual Ticket that have file collector windows which will point to a specific job or contract folder. In the case of contracts, for example, the scanned image of the contract is saved there. One of our departments creates a budget for each job and that is stored in the contract folder also. Everyone can always go back to the contract, through the file collector window in Virtual Ticket, to see word for word what it says and what the budgets are. There is no room for error. The same relational capabilities are there for our job and production folders."

Saul Morse, McMurry's Chief Information Officer, says that the company initially compared Workgroups to other packages on the market but none of them displayed the same versatility. "The packages we looked at," says Morse, "didn't have the complete range of Workgroups. For example, many were not cross platform compatible for both Macs and PC's, which was one of our criteria for choosing the best option. We also needed a solution that we could easily customize to meet our specific needs. Workgroups is very robust and integrates with most programs."

Workgroups gives us a tool set that we can build everything around - and that flexibility is very popular among the staff.
Saul Morse, Director of Information Technology

"It gives us a tool set that we can build everything around — that flexibility is very popular among the staff. And that flexibility was also extremely important with the recent acquisition by McMurry of Redspring Communications, helping us to more easily combine different workflows and technologies used by the two companies."

"What it really comes down to is scalability," says Morse. "We are a company that has been growing rapidly. We have a lot of jobs for multiple clients being worked on at one time. It was becoming difficult to track all of the jobs and to keep track of our budget and visual information. What we saw with Workgroups was an opportunity to build to the next level. It has allowed us to take on more clients while keeping the same quality of service. By centralizing all of our information we are literally all on the same page."

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