Online customer, accounts and project management for creative professionals has the distinct advantage that you don’t need a Mac to work with it. Creative Manager is such a system. And a good one at that, too.
Creative Manager lives inside your web browser. It is a web application service you subscribe to. Creative Manager offers a complete solution to the ad agency and to other creative firms, but it is less suitable for very small operations. Creative Manager has but one real downside to it: when the Internet is congested, your user experience stalls.
Creative Manager’s interface requires some getting used to. An administrator is not really necessary—the system is quite easy to set up and maintain—but without an administrator the odds are that you will spend a lot of time tuning the system and its data, and that is, of course, time lost.
This is in no way meant as serious criticism, as all Customer Relationship Management / Project Management / Accounting solutions suffer from this “disadvantage”. It basically means that if you’re alone or running a very small business of less than let’s say 5 people, you can move faster with pen and paper.
Everything beyond this size is a potential customer of a CRM system. That’s my opinion, and I could be wrong, but given the experience I have with testing these systems, I would say you spend way too much time filling in all kinds of fields and adding to records when you should be selling and writing, drawing or whatever it is you regard as your core business.
Back to Creative Manager. The interface is well laid out, and when you get your access, you are welcomed with the possibility of following some hands-on videos in your browser and a few basic guidelines to go with them. My advice is watch those videos and read through the short manuals. It will save you much time afterwards.
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As with any CRM (or enterprise automation system), you must follow the workflow path set out for you by the developers. CRM solutions are always programmed according to the developer’s concept of CRM he had when he started his venture, and this “grand idea” is always reflected in the way you have to do things as a user.
If you can’t find yourself in this workflow, then the system will take much more time to get accustomed to than is strictly necessary. Unfortunately, none of the CRM systems I know of will allow users to set up their own workflow, except then for the more or less chaotic or strict order of doing things.
A good example of a chaotic system—chaotic here meaning that you can start where you want, bringing along with it the risk of having to go back and forth between the same kind of records and fields multiple times—is MarketCircle’s Daylite, which we reviewed earlier.
Daylite installs on your Mac OS X system and allows you to start with adding contacts, or with companies or with projects, or with pretty much anything else. This frees you of following a strict procedure, but you do risk losing sight of what you’ve done.
On the other hand, Creative Manager is more strict about what you should do first. If you start by adding contacts, that’s a good idea. If you want to start by adding projects, that’s far worse, as you don’t have client IDs yet. Those client IDs are necessary to fill in when you add a project, and Creative Manager won’t let you proceed before these IDs have been filled in properly.
This doesn’t mean Creative Manager can’t be tuned to your preferences, quite on the contrary in fact. The Admin panel gives access to about 50 settings panels.
Once you’ve got the hang of Creative Manager’s basic concept, the workflow is easy to follow. A very good point for the Creative Manager developers is that they never show you more options than are available at any time in the management process. Fill in the fields for a new client, and with the page refresh you suddenly get access to a lot more buttons than before.
This hiding of otherwise confusing options is something that is (more or less) easily done in a browser-based system.
So, Creative Manager is a powerful CRM. How does it compare to Daylite? It doesn’t really. Daylite is a general-purpose CRM solution running off your Mac. Creative Manager is a CRM very clearly aimed at creative businesses running inside the browser, off a remote server.
The market in which Creative Manager plays its role, is the creative business market—specifically the ad agencies market—and nothing else. The most obvious place to find prove thereof is the Media tab/button. The Media button reveals a list of publications and/or broadcast related companies who will distribute the creative output of your company.
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This is something entirely lacking with other CRMs, and one of the features that make Creative Manager stand out in this market. It doesn’t imply that you can’t use Creative Manager for anything else. In my opinion, you could, but it does mean the system is especially efficient when used in this sort of operating environment.
Working with Creative Manager is easy and as much fun as you can possibly have with any CRM. As far as I can judge its concept and efficiency, I found it a powerful enterprise-class service. During the weeks that I was allowed access to my test area in the system, I received at least two service updates and one apologies for a system downtime that was the result of some glitch in the server software.
The uptime is an important issue with remote systems, which is why big companies must seriously consider buying the server and running Creative Manager from their own server hardware. I’m sure many of them do. As for all the modules that are available—clients, accounts, billing, projects, opportunities, tasks, contacts, etc.—they are all perfectly integrated. I also found them to be integrated in a logical way so that the most obvious workflow in any creative business is fully supported. The project management module, for example, has support for Gantt charts and end-date determined projects.
If your business fits the description of Creative Manager’s target market, you might seriously consider running their demo.
