MRM Explained

What savings should MRM deliver?

The question is, how many of the above benefits turn into real cost savings. Saving staff time is a significant benefit of itself, but it does not always achieve actual cost savings.

There have been several surveys of the savings delivered from MRM. Probably, the one most quoted by Suppliers is the research from Accenture (www.accenture.com) set out below - this is extracted from the CRM Project paper issued in October 2002 by N. Jain and M. Seiler.

This shows that an MRM system (because MRM manages all of the processes listed below) will deliver between 10% and 19% savings once it is fully operational.

Factors which can affect this saving?

The 10% -19% savings should be achievable by any organisation which implements the right MRM in the right way, once the system is fully operational. Set out below are factors which can delay the savings unless early action is planned.

1. On-going workload
Though the MRM system will be a significant aid to productivity, it will not reduce the workload, and there will probably continue to be the need to pass some of the work on to Agencies purely because of the pressure of work.

Some of the cash savings from MRM are achieved by moving tasks from the Agencies to the in-house staff, of itself this will eat in to the time savings achieved by MRM.

2. Time effects upon estimated savings
Large amounts of the savings will be achieved from re-using collateral stored in the Digital Asset Management system. Based upon experience gained in DAM implementations, the full extent of these savings is normally not achieved until the second year of operation. This is because it takes time to build up a store of all usable collateral. This will also be particularly difficult for areas where the retention of collateral has not previously been managed from an enterprise wide approach. Further, in the first 6 months of operation, people are slower on the system, because they have less experience, and some Campaigns are already committed to Agencies and so unaffected by any MRM systems.

A realistic calculation of savings would therefore follow the model set out below.

First six months of operation:

-	Possible saving 10% - 19%
-	Experience indicates that only 25% of this will be achieved
For the subsequent 6 months:
-	Possible saving 10% - 19%
-	Experience indicates that will increase to 60%

During year 2 there is normally a significant increase, because staff are more experienced, and more significantly, because the Digital Asset Management system contains sufficient records to be a major productivity tool whilst the pipeline of non-transferable work, (i.e. forward committed to Agencies) will have been depleted.

During this time it would be usual to achieve 80% of the benefits in the first 6 months and 100% thereafter.