Shamrock Creative

Each year, Shamrock Graphics produces over 1500 jobs including film output, designing marketing campaigns, web sites, ads and videos, and much more. Shamrock Creative's total company sales approach $30 million annually. "We have no limitations to bind us," says Creative Director Dave Larson. "We can put your logo on a pen, or on a boat that we're selling you. We can give you film from an existing disk, or design an ad campaign from the ground up. We offer any services the customer wants."

Before Workgroups, Shamrock Creative designers and management were keeping track of their business on three-part paper forms. These forms were consolidated on a regular basis and stored in file cabinets, where employees would search manually when they needed to locate an archived file or job change order. The valuable time lost searching for old files and filling out forms for current jobs was too much for Shamrock Creative management. When they purchased Workgroups, the change was felt immediately throughout the company.

Workgroups has made those cabinets obsolete by providing full archiving of all files, whether they're located on the network or in a CD library. Shamrock Creative's digital resources are now all searchable by resource, by job, by customer, by keyword or by any other information recorded in the database. According to Larson, "This is an amazing feature when repeat jobs come in. If we need a graphic we used years before, we can find it even if we don't know what job it was used on, or even what the name of the file was. And we can find it quickly."

But archiving is only half of the story. "We have also recreated all of our company forms in Workgroups. All of our fax sheets, customer support forms, job change forms — everything is immediately available and completely customizable. With Workgroups, we're not forced to work in ways we're not used to."

If we need a graphic we used years before we can find it even if we don't know what job it was used on, or even what the name of the file was. And we can find it quickly.
Dave Larson, Creative Director

According to Larson, Shamrock Creative's designers were less than enthusiastic about leaving their familiar paper forms for electronic job tracking. "They were just resistant to change, that's all. Job Manager has sped everything up. It allows less room for error, and we do less manual work. When the designers saw that they can record their work by simply clicking 'Start' and 'Stop', they gave up the paper forms entirely. They can't live without Job Manager now."

Download this spotlight