McGraw Hill simplifies media asset development and improves

McGraw Hill simplifies media asset

development and improves efficiency

with Smartsheet

Even before schools around the world took the majority

of their learning online, educational publisher McGraw

Hill dedicated signiﬁcant time and effort to creating

digital learning products that feature media assets such

as artwork, photos, and videos. Tracking the development

and revision of those assets used to be difﬁcult, as

metadata and permission information was scattered

among spreadsheets, email, and disconnected project

notes. Today, McGraw Hill uses Smartsheet to create a

single repository of media asset data, saving time and

making it easier to reuse existing material in new ways.

Situation:

McGraw Hill creates thousands of media assets every year

for use in a wide range of digital and print learning products.

Working with contractors, Karen Pytel, design lead, Design

Operations and Strategy, and her colleagues outline the

speciﬁcations to identify, create, track and procure media assets

that will engage and delight students and teachers.

“The shift to digital for us has been big,” Pytel says. “For us that

means it’s important to be able to ﬁnd and quickly repurpose

assets that exist already, without spending hours reinventing the

wheel every time, helping us work within budget and at scale.”

Pytel says the process used to be “incredibly painful.” Records

of media assets weren’t always tracked in a single place, and

obtaining visibility into the work in progress required searching

through multiple emails and spreadsheets.

“We needed visibility into what we were making,” Pytel says. “It

was really cumbersome to pull metrics or data out of 10 Excel

logs or an outdated database. Smartsheet gave us the reporting

Company

McGraw Hill

Industry

Educational Publishing

Company Size

3,500+ employees

Customer Proﬁle

McGraw Hill is a learning science company that delivers

personalized learning experiences that drive results

for students, parents, educators and professionals. The

company focuses on educational equity, affordability

and learning success to help learners build better lives.

Website

mheducation.com

Business Situation

McGraw Hill wanted to make its processes for

creating and tracking educational media assets

more efﬁcient and accountable by leveraging

technology to bring information into a single place.

Solution

McGraw Hill uses Smartsheet to automate and

simplify the process of creating media assets for its

educational products, cutting time and effort out

of assigning work, entering data, and processing

vendor payment — improving efﬁciency by 50%.

Beneﬁts

• A 50% improvement in efﬁciency through

automating and streamlining processes

• A single place to organize critical information

from project details to teamwide resources

•

More time for brainstorming and creative

concepting & less time spent on administrative tasks

• Completion of projects under shorter deadlines

with less human error

Smartsheet frees up our designers to spend time being creative, brainstorming, and

concepting big ideas with their team instead of spending hours on data entry, pulling metrics,

and chasing answers through emails. Smartsheet lets us focus on the fun stuff.

Karen Pytel, Design Lead, Design Operations and Strategy, McGraw Hill

functionality that we were

looking for to be able to spend

two minutes looking up key data,

rather than half a day.”

Solution:

Tygre Morehart joined the Design

Operations and Strategy team as a

designer, and soon began meeting

with colleagues to share ideas

about how to improve project

tracking and processes. When a

colleague showed her Smartsheet,

Morehart immediately saw the

possibilities for streamlining

and improving efﬁciency across

internal and external teams.

“Since beginning with the

company, I was a bit frustrated

that starting new projects seemed

like a new process every time,”

Morehart says. “I knew we could

address most pain points and

be prepared for nearly every

aspect and need of a project.

Smartsheet enabled us to build

those templates and ask the right

questions so we could be more

efﬁcient and scalable.”

Beneﬁts:

Today McGraw Hill uses

Smartsheet to manage creation

of educational media assets. From

automation to communications,

Smartsheet helps McGraw Hill

reduce human error and create

better educational products.

A streamlined process that frees

up time for creativity: Academic

designers write content and create

speciﬁcations for the media they

need. The speciﬁcations go into

a sheet, which can be shared

line by line with the appropriate

contractor to create each media

ﬁle. Metadata for assets is kept

up to date, and questions and

changes are communicated via

Smartsheet conversations and

update requests, streamlining

project communication and

reducing email clutter.

“Not only are we doing more with

less, but our project timeframes

are getting tighter,” Pytel says.

“We used to have a development

cycle of a year or longer, and

now it’s getting crunched to

about nine months. Being more

efﬁcient has really helped us keep

our workload manageable, keep

our hours manageable, and keep

our sanity.”

Pytel and her colleagues use

dashboards to track project

assets, progress toward project

completion, daily task scheduling

and past-due reporting.

Dashboards serve as project

information hubs, providing a

single place to capture contact

lists, project SharePoints, ISBN

numbers, and other details

crucial to the development of

educational products.

Cutting vendor invoicing from

three weeks to half a day: With

Smartsheet, McGraw Hill has

been able to cut the vendor

invoice review process from

three weeks or more to half a

day. That’s just one example of

time saved; Pytel says the team

has seen at least a 50% efﬁciency

gain, and is able to deliver against

an increased workﬂow and

tighter schedules.

“For me, our vendor invoicing

was the most painful process of

all of the steps we had to do in

managing assets,” Morehart says.

“Once I ﬁgured out how to track

and manage this process using

the key data we were already

tracking in Smartsheet, it was

such a relief! Both our internal and

external teams could save time by

utilizing what was already there.

I was able to take a process that

previously could take up to three

weeks and accomplish it in four

hours thanks to Smartsheet. Now,

we can also roll that information

to our department heads so they

can have better forecasting and

budget insight.”

Automation to enable quick

problem-solving: Automation

has cut complexity and time out

of each project, especially the

licensing process. Each piece

of media must be reviewed by

a content licensing coordinator

to ensure that all necessary

approvals for use of the media

have been secured.

Previously, if usage rights were

denied for one media asset, it

could potentially impact the

delivery date of a project, sending

the designers scrambling to ﬁnd

a replacement and make any

resulting design and content

changes. Now, if usage permission

is denied, an automated workﬂow

instantly sends an alert to

everyone who needs to know

about it, enabling designers to

react faster, with less impact to

the schedule.

“One day a colleague shared

an issue they had on a project

because of miscommunication

of an image being denied,”

Morehart says. “It held up ﬁnal

pass and created more stress

than necessary. I knew this was

the perfect use-case example of

how a simple step in Smartsheet

would beneﬁt the entire team. It

would trigger an automation to

everyone required and immediate

action could be taken. The person

Smartsheet Inc.

/smartsheet

/company/smartsheet-com

@smartsheetplatform

[email protected]

(844) 324-2360

smartsheet.com

denying the image does not have

to ﬁgure out who needs to receive

an email and what information

needs to be included — it's all built

into Smartsheet.”

More interpersonal

communication, less human

error: One of the biggest beneﬁts

to using Smartsheet is that

multiple people can collaborate

in one space, making it much

easier to communicate and solve

problems. Another is that the

platform provides a common

source of accurate information on

each project. That’s important for

new content being developed, and

for existing assets being reused in

new ways.

“We have a lot less human error,”

Pytel says. “I’m working on a

project now where I’m going

back to these older programs and

trying to dig up the data. That

data has a lot of holes because we

didn’t have a place where change

management could occur, and this

particular program went through

four reprints. I say every day that

I cannot wait till we get to a point

where every single program

has been tracked in Smartsheet

and we can just pull it out of the

archive, dust it off and use it as a

template for whatever new thing

we’re building.”

Morehart and Pytel also love

the fact that Smartsheet is

constantly adding new features

and functionality. When prooﬁng

was introduced, Pytel says, “We

freaked out.” The team signed

up to beta-test the feature,

and continues to use it to keep

feedback in the Smartsheet

platform with the rest of the

project information. They’re

also looking forward to new

possibilities stemming from

Smartsheet’s acquisition of

Brandfolder, which they hope

will allow them to centrally store

large media ﬁles with all the other

project details, as well as avoid

exceeding their size allocations on

other ﬁle sharing systems.

“One of the biggest beneﬁts is

the scalability and efﬁciency that

Smartsheet gives us,” Morehart

says. “We’re able to create a

workspace template that every

project can use to start from

scratch and yet adapt it to their

own unique needs. Before, I felt

like we were working in a thousand

different systems. Smartsheet has

brought all those together.”

About Smartsheet

Smartsheet (NYSE:SMAR) is a leading cloud-based platform for work execution, enabling teams and organizations to plan, capture,

manage, automate, and report on work at scale, resulting in more efﬁcient processes and better business outcomes. Today over 95,000

customers, including more than 77,000 domain-based customers and over 70 percent of the companies in the Fortune 500, rely on

Smartsheet to implement, manage, and automate processes across a broad array of departments and use cases.