Productive Serves Makerstreet as a Single Source of Truth
Makerstreet is an Amsterdam-based collective of agencies with over 300 employees in four offices in the Netherlands and one in Spain. Makerstreet brings brands to life through design, digital products and services. We spoke with Fréderique van der Wijk, Operations Director at Makerstreet Marketing & Innovation and Makerstreet Partner Maike Vilé to learn how Productive facilitated their day-to-day work and growth.
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Can you tell us a bit about your roles within Makerstreet?
Fréderique: I’m responsible for the operations part in the marketing and innovation part within Makerstreet, and there are several units amongst that. I’m responsible for the planning and financial part.
Maike: I’m one of the managing partners at Makerstreet. I focus on internal operations in the fields of project management, HR, and finance. I’ve been here for about 10 years, so I’ve watched the agency grow from the small company that it was in around—well, I believe it was 12 years ago—really, a room in an attic, to what we are now.
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What impressed you or caught your interest when you first saw a demo of Productive?
Fréderique: Productive was more elaborate than the other tools we used, and for the whole Makerstreet collective, it was really important that we use one and the same tool for all our companies because now we are now working on more projects together. From the beginning, it was very user-friendly for us and I noticed team members liked using it, and management liked using it.
At first, people don’t like change, but then when you say “Just try!” Everyone was quiet and they said it was really easy, and now they find it really nice to work with.
How would you describe your operations and resource planning workflow now?
Maike: What’s nice about Productive is now we use scheduling as an actual data resource to create our financial forecasts. So the actual data in scheduling is the source for our financial forecasting now. So no more manual work, which is really nice and it gives everybody an extra push to make sure that their scheduling is accurate because it’s the basis of the financial forecast. So, if you want an accurate financial forecast, if you want that—you should have accurate scheduling. We’re really happy with that.
“With growth comes a bigger need for one source of truth, and that’s what it gives us, and that’s really important.”
What would you say are the top business benefits agencies can experience when using Productive?
Fréderique: I think the greatest benefit is that we have it all in one tool, in one—all together. Before Productive and before we used the other tool, we were like 15 people and an Excel might do the trick. Not to the best, but it did it. You know you have a lot in your head, so it worked… But, because we grow, that’s the main reason why we need it, and why it’s so helpful.
Maike: What’s really nice about it is it enables us to work easily together across the whole company, but it still gives us the opportunity to treat the different departments as separate businesses, which they still are.
With growth comes a bigger need for one source of truth, and that’s what it gives us, and that’s really important.
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