Award-winning, LA-based NCompass is a global, independent, women-owned business with over two decades of experience. Today, NCompass has grown into a full-service brand engagement and marketing solutions agency, serving Fortune 200 brands across entertainment and CPG, as well as lifestyle and esports brands.
The challenge
As Samantha Stormo, Head of Production, explains, the live event industry “came to a screeching halt” in March 2020. And so, instead of trying to continue as usual, the NCompass team decided to use this period as an opportunity to reflect and truly start redesigning the way they work. They also saw a need to recreate the collaboration space where anybody, internally or externally, could access information at the click of a button.
“Pre-pandemic, we struggled to make the space to prioritize these big changes to our inner workings because we didn’t want to jeopardize active client work or slow down our team. But without the pace of our normal schedule holding us back, we jumped into the opportunity to re-evaluate and reset our values, our goals, and how we wanted to show up for our clients and ourselves.”
As a result, NCompass needed to find a platform that would fulfil a wide range of goals:
- Budget: A tool to help them author smart budgets quickly, document approvals, and effectively evaluate profitability before contracting business.
- Integration: Gaps between the project and finance teams often caused redundant work that hampered cash planning.
- Efficiency: The company needed a tool to help eliminate or automate as many steps from the workflow as possible.
- Collaboration: Given their global, time-zone-sensitive, remote work, they needed a collaborative tool to connect teams in a supported space that allowed them to work together seamlessly.
- Evolution: Given their lightning-fast pace, they needed a tool that would help them continue to learn, grow, and evolve quickly in a rapidly-changing world.
Why Scoro?
The team evaluated dozens of professional services automation (PSA) platforms. Critically, Scoro offered a project finance and work management ecosystem, including many features that NCompass needed to set up their evaluation criteria.
Through the process, we uncovered an incredible amount of opportunity within our workflow to grow and to positively impact our business on a significant level.
Business benefits
Data insights: After almost a year of using Scoro, the team benefits from access to quality data and insights from that data like never before.
Better collaboration: Through Scoro, the team has unprecedented visibility and access, including executive and accounting dashboards with the most essential information front and centre, saving significant time on reporting and planning. Teams can share client quotes and invoicing, project work, and spending seamlessly.
Greater efficiency: By implementing Scoro, NCompass has managed to eliminate four legacy tools and either eliminate or automate 22 steps in their workflow, with more features still to explore within Scoro’s platform. As a result, NCompass believes there is even more room for growth in this area.
Our people spent a significant amount of time completing forms, manually entering data, in back-and-forth approval threads, sharing out-of-date information, and in redundant work in general. Eliminating those burdens from our workflow gives us an incredible amount of time to focus on delivering best-in-class marketing solutions and client services – where we want to be focused.
Real-time delivery: Today, NCompass can instantly produce smart quotes for clients using informed data, which helps minimize wait and revision times. They can also show clients highly-customized documents by pulling all the information together in a few clicks.
The future is bright with Scoro
The future is bright for NCompass as they build on their efficiencies by further integrating Scoro into their workflow. This year’s integration will include complete billing and AP synchronization to get the most out of the robust Scoro platform.
NCompass is also laying the groundwork for integrating an external accounts payable system later in the year, alongside other process improvements to continue their focus on efficiency.
For multi-million-dollar projects with numerous invoices, this represents substantial time savings that can be better spent on other critical initiatives.
NCompass is also excited to explore the customer portal feature in Scoro, potentially enabling external clients and key partners to collaborate on project planning.
With tools like Scoro, effective efficiency and collaboration allow the team a greater work-life balance and time to focus on things that truly matter and move the needle – in their professional and personal lives. As a whole, our agency is excited about the opportunities arising from using such an integrated platform and what that means for us going, and growing, forward.