Productivity solutions guide
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The power and flexibility of FileMaker has helped Sohnar create an award winning project management and reporting system, called Traffic, for the creative design sector—an area notoriously averse to the notion of management.
According to Sohnar Managing director Tracey Shirtcliff: “ Traffic helps creative design businesses manage their processes in a faster, cheaper and more efficient manner. Project-management software is either too complex or too simple. We wanted to create a system that was simple on the surface but with all the complexity and sophistication needed below the bonnet. We built Traffic from scratch around the design process—the real-world process, not the theory. We were able to do this because we all come from a design and/or marketing background, while others of the Sohnar team are former studio managers and creative directors. It’s this combination of business wisdom and practical experience that lets us make Traffic work the way our clients do. Traffic exists solely to help design-based businesses improve profits.
“When we came to look at the best tool to use to develop Traffic, there was really only one choice—FileMaker. There were a number of reasons for our decision. First, FileMaker is great to model an application with,” Shirtcliff says. “We were able to develop, test and modify very quickly, allowing us to manage the development process more rapidly. Another powerful feature was the interface. It’s possible to create a usable and attractive interface using FileMaker, and this is now one of our USPs. Lastly, and most importantly, FileMaker is cross-platform. It’s well known and respected as a great product in the design sector.”
One of the key challenges facing the design industry is the increasing demand for transparency from clients, Shirtcliff says: “Traffic is all about operational transparency. It lets you better manage ‘scope creep’ and overruns before they impact on job profit. Traffic gives control of the marginal profit drivers that are usually obscured by layers of detail. It lets us produce client-facing reports that remove the traditional smoke-and-mirrors approach of design work. Again, FileMaker gave us the flexibility to model the system to work the way people do in the creative services industry we aren’t asking them to re-engineer the way they work, and that’s key.”
Saving time means saving money—the integrated nature of Traffic is vital to its functionality. Issuing orders or booking bikes is easy. So is printing or emailing letters, labels, gant charts, contact reports, estimates, tenders, orders invoices and reports. New business is also well supported with sales pipeline tracking, integrated correspondence and mailing facilities and full contact histories.
Continues Shirtcliff: “FileMaker helped us to build the model we wanted, with users interacting through seven domains. This means the view that users get is driven by their job function. The seven domains act as one-stop-shops—the Hub, for sales and marketing; Trackpad for creatives; Traffic for project management; as well as Billings, Diary, Projects and Admin. All of these areas inter-relate—for example, each designer’s Trackpad will show their timetable, from which they can click through to the details of every project they’re working on, or where they can raise orders or charge expenses. The relational power of FileMaker meant we could build our model very easily.”
Anyone can create and send internal or external emails without having to leave Traffic. A link to Adobe Acrobat also means documents such as estimates and invoices can be automatically created as PDFs and either printed or sent by email. FileMaker allowed this functionality to be built into Traffic easily.
Concludes Shirtcliff: “We put a lot of effort into the interface design—FileMaker gave us the ability to build interfaces the way we wanted. We fully understand that the success of a new management system rests on how it is received by users—and that there can be understandable resistance. No-one wants to feel they are being compared to a machine—on the other hand, if you don’t turn creativity into cash, you can’t nurture it. Traffic treads this delicate line between creativity and business by being valuable to everyone from the outset. Without FileMaker, we wouldn’t have been able to build Traffic the way we wanted.”
Timesheets mean that it’s easy to keep track of job progress.
Traffic’s integrated technology makes for real time-savings—meaning real money savings, too.