E.T. Browne Drug Co. says joint Equilibrium and Nintex visual workflow system provided massive ROI

Case Study: Workflow Has 5005% ROI over 5 years, delivers $29 million, is essential for reliably and securely managing packaging production at scale

Award: Equilibrium WINS Nintex Solution Innovation Award in Packaging Category

E.T. Browne Drug Co. says Nintex and Equilibrium workflow is essential to reviewing, approving labels and packaging at scale to support continued growth.

Payback in four days-and a couple of hours

What return to investment do you get from your workflow automation solution?
The workflow solution at E.T. Browne Drug Co. paid for itself in just four days and a couple of hours. The ROI is an astonishing $29 million, or 5005%, over five years.

Got your interest ?

Whether or not you know E.T. Browne, you likely know, it’s most popular product: Palmer’s Cocoa Butter, sold worldwide and the #1 cocoa butter brand in US. The 180-year-old family business rightly prides itself as a leader in treatment-oriented beauty products. Until recently, it did not, however, pride itself on aspects of its label and packaging process.

The company continually designs and redesigns its labels and packaging both for new products and for new formulations of existing products-as well as to meet new regulatory requirements in each of the 100 countries in which it does business. The review and approval process for this content involves departments throughout the company, including research and development, marketing, legal and compliance and manufacturing, each of which has its own needs and perspectives on what needs to be in the content-and how it should look.

Getting their reviews and approvals used to be a manual process-and subject to the traditional drawback of paper or PDF-based workflows. Documents could sit on a manager’s desk for days or weeks, inevitably delaying time to market. There was little visibility into the status of on going reviews with constant issues around whether someone had the correct version for review and no reminders to perform tasks. The resulting delay in bringing new products and product iterations to market was a clear and present danger in a highly competitive marketplace.

As E.T. Browne started to automate the workflow, another issue emerged: The company wasn’t just routing alphanumeric data, but visual data and content, including the size, shape, color, and positioning of label and packaging materials.

Every department had to see the labels and packaging exactly the same way-exactly as it was supposed to appear on the product. But the Adobe Illustrator files in which that content was created weren’t supported by SharePoint. The pre-rendering into PDFs lacked the precision the company needed for meaningful approvals.

Workflow for precise images

E.T. Browne has addressed these concerns with an automated workflow solution ased on Nintex Workflow and Nintex Forms, leveraging Equilibrium’s Mediarich® OneViewer™ technology, which supports over 450 file types and creates a secure universal viewing experience automatically inside of SharePoint. The solution enables all approvers to view the exact images in the Ai files fro single source, directly from notification emails, at their desks or on their mobile devices – anywhere – and without the need for plug-ins, downloads or special applications such as Acrobat or Adobe Illustrator.

“We can pan and zoom into a label in Nintex Workflow to see details we wouldn’t have seen in a PDF,” – says Pieter Goes, Vice President of IT and BI at E.T. Browne. “With Nintex and Equilibrium’s team, we don’t experience pauses or errors in workflow, don’t have to track down workflow status. The review process just works – and works much fasted and more reliably than before.”

“Out of the box, Nintex offered al the features we were looking for,” Goes explains.
“we knew we couldn’t meet our business needs with SharePoint alone, and that Nintex is the industry leader in workflow on SharePoint. We didn’t want a custom solution that would be difficult and expensive to develop and maintain.
The combination of Nintex with Equilibrium fit our needs like a glove”

Out of the box, Nintex offered all the features we were looking for… The combination of Nintex with Equilibrium fit our needs like a glove

Pieter Goes, Vice President of IT and BI, E.T. Browne

Inside the $29 million benefit

Among the Nintex features that Goes points to are the ability to implement multiple reviews simultaneously, to send reminders, and to implement “smart approvals” that automatically approve a review and move it to the next step after a specified number of days. “That really sped things up for us,” Goes says.

With all the ways this joint solution accelerates the workflow, what used to be a two-to-three week approval process now takes place in a week or less, a reduction of at least 50%, according to Goes.

E.T. Browne conducted a detailed analysis of the impact of the faster, more reliable and auditable approval process on its bottom line. The results: The Nintex and Equilibrium solution is a huge financial boon both by accelerating business value and by reducing cost.

Most of the five-year, $29 million impact cited earlier–$23.7 million-comes from the faster creation of business value. And most of that–$16.5 million-comes from increased revenue enabled by the faster time to market. The rest of the business-value gains come from greater employee efficiency, more efficient marketing, and an increase in marketing agency delivery.

E.t. Browne sees $5.9 million in five-year benefit both from direct cost savings and estimated time savings. The direct cost savings come from better brand management control, self-service enablement, centralization of content repositories, reduced marketing agency billings, and more. The estimated time savings include making it faster and easier for casual users to search, download, and inspect content, as well as for power users and content creators to search, upload, transcode and modify workflow.

See the case study and webinar here

“Producing new and updated labels and packaging at scale is essential to our continued growth.
We couldn’t do that work without Nintex and Equilibrium. – Pieter Goes, Vice President of IT and BI, E.T. Browne