Sunny Delight uses ProofHQ for quality assurance

International beverages company introduces new solution to improve collaboration on marketing documents

Background

With the beverages industry being so tightly regulated, it was critical that Sunny Delight were able to control the quality of their products

The Sunny Delight Beverages Company is a global beverages brand, with Head Offices in Ohio and Spain. Best known for Sunny D, their orange flavoured drink, they also produce other products such as Fruit2O, Elations, Fruit Simple and Verfine.

Sunny Delight produces a wide range of marketing collateral to support its brands. These include packaging artwork, technical documents including formulations and quality procedures along with website designs and promotional material. Each item goes through a strict review and approval process that involves many different teams, each with its own area of specialisation. Review teams include people from the Marketing, Innovation, Technical, Quality and Regulatory departments along with external agencies depending on the project.

The beverages industry is so tightly regulated that it's incredibly important that all teams are able to collaborate effectively to ensure that the product material and packaging is clear and relevant.

"We couldn't believe our luck when we found ProofHQ, it seemed too good to be true” Lee Taylor, International Technical Director

Problem

The large number of reviewers required to sign off a proof was becoming impossible to manage

Lee Taylor, International Technical Director, explains that the company used to use Adobe Acrobat in their European division for their proofing needs but found collaboration and the sharing of documents particularly difficult. Lee describes how individual PDF documents were being circulated but each of the reviewers were unable to view the comments made by others.

Having decided that they needed to find a better way to improve collaboration between reviewers and streamline their process, they began the search for a better solution.

Solution

Sunny Delight now uses ProofHQ as a simple solution to all of their needs

There are a number of different workflows, depending on the type of document and the department managing the review process. Generally it is the Technical and Marketing teams that upload the proofs but the final approval stage varies depending on the project. ProofHQ gives each team the flexibility to manage reviews in a way that suits them, but maintains a central record of every proof going through the system.

Proofs are organized in a simple list, with the only exception being technical proofs, which are separated so that they can be easily identified and retrieved for later reference.

ProofHQ allows everyone to share the same online proof and see each others' comment in real time. This is a big improvement over the previous process, where everyone had an individual copy of the PDF and nobody could see anyone else's comments.

The threaded commenting means that reviewers can replay to each others' comments and so quickly reach decisions around important issues, resulting in fewer revisions and faster approval.

Due to the tight regulatory requirements regarding the wording on packaging, it is important that no feedback is missed. ProofHQ's version comparison tool allows versions to be compared side-by-side, this means that it's simple for the team to ensure that all feedback has been incorporated in future versions. This means that the quality control is much tighter and easier to manage.

One of the main benefits of ProofHQ is that teams can access the proofs from anywhere over the web. This makes it easy for teams based in remote locations to review and approve proofs.

ProofHQ converts a huge range of document types into a web based proof, so reviewers don't require the original programme in which the document was created. This has also taken away the need for each reviewer to have a full version of Adobe Acrobat installed.

"We now use ProofHQ to enable us to streamline our approval and review process whilst also providing us with some fantastic proofing tools which enable very coherent communication between reviewer and author” Lee Taylor, International Technical Director

Results

The whole review and approval process is much more efficient

Improved collaboration has made the whole review and approval process much more efficient, accelerating the time for documents and artwork to be signed off. This quality of feedback has also improved by allowing teams to communicate more effectively, producing documents and artwork that meets everybody's expectations.

In particular, the ability for ProofHQ to integrate with Basecamp has improved their processes significantly, "We can see the history of a document review in the context of a project. We even manage our project approval process from within Basecamp".