About Serco
Serco specialises in the delivery of essential public services. From the ‘Boris bikes’ in London, all the way to the kilometre-long Ghan train in Australia, Serco run a vast number of operations. In fact, they are one of the largest outsourced service companies in the world with a turnover of over £5 billion. They operate traffic management systems covering over 17,500 kms and manage 192,000 miles of airspace.
Before finding a Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution in 2013, this was no easy task.
The Challenge - Managing brand assets across an organisation of 100,000 + people
Serco employs over 100,000 people worldwide. For the communications team, managing the endless phone calls and email requests for assets from employees and external suppliers was time-consuming, costly and frustrating. What’s more, ensuring brand consistency across all corners of their organisation was near impossible.
They needed a DAM solution that would:
Drive efficiency in the organisation by encouraging employees and external suppliers to use available assets
Improve the effectiveness of communications and develop best practices
Significantly reduce the number of email and phone requests made to the communications team
How Asset Bank helped
When Serco approached us, we were able to sit down with them and discuss their needs in-depth. They essentially needed a ‘brand hub’, a place to store and manage branded assets, guidelines and more. This way everybody in the organisation would be clear on what was expected when sending digital files into the outside world.
Due to the sheer size of their organisation, we agreed that our Enterprise plan would be the best solution. However, for companies of this size, stakeholder buy-in can be tricky.
That’s where one of our Senior DAM consultants was able to help. We were quickly able to set up a free demo that was completely personalised and aligned with Serco’s brand. From there, it was easy for senior management to understand why Asset Bank was such an effective and worthwhile investment.
“The team had put together a demo site. It made the ‘sell’ a lot easier. My colleagues could actually see how all the things work, not in somebody else's look and feel, but in ours.” - Ben Giles, Group Head of Digital Marketing and Brand.
The Results
Six months after the implementation of Serco’s Asset Bank, and it was clear our DAM solution was the right choice. Not only are all of Serco’s digital assets in one centralised location, but they can take advantage of some fantastic Enterprise features including:
- LDAP integration with their server so they can create a single-sign in process for their employees
- Organisational units to create different group administrator
- Multilingual versions
- REST API to allow other systems to search and retrieve assets
- Different groups of metadata fields for asset types
- CMS integration so they can quickly find and upload media to their website
"It’s a fantastic tool, making my life a lot easier, which is exactly what I wanted!"
Ben Giles, Communications manager
Watch this short interview with Ben filmed at our recent Asset Bank Get-together.
