August 13, 2020 • News
Bilal Tarawneh, Finance Director at Hotwire UK is sharing with us how the agency has transitioned over the past few years and adopted effective working practices across the globe
Hotwire is a global communications agency that helps businesses better engage and connect with their customers. From Sydney to San Francisco, they operate with a borderless mind-set across 34 locations.
The agency was elected one of the best places to work for two consecutives years, 2019 and 2020, by the prestigious PR WEEK magazine.
We have multiple platforms that we use which have been in place for some time, long before the current lockdown situation, as part of our working processes across a number of different locations.
In finance, for instance, Paprika provides a platform for information sharing. When it’s needed with regard to a project it’s always available, wherever the employee is based. They can check information and get an update on how things are going easily. Also, it fits with our paperless processes. With the volume of information that we have this makes a big difference to the efficiency of our processes.
Having visibility across multiple markets makes things easier for the teams. It could be that a project in the USA is using a designer from Europe and both sides can access what they need and keep up to date with progress.
Importantly, the systems are used internally and externally, which is important to us as a global company.
Our clients also benefit from the information that we are sharing between us. Our relationship with them is more efficient.
We began with Paprika as a finance system but that has developed over the years into a number of processes throughout the business. When new functions become available, we discuss together how they might fit in with our business and specifics, whether we need that function and how it can be of use to Hotwire.
Sometimes, it works the other way round, where we have an issue for which we need a solution, Paprika develops a way to introduce a process specifically for us that meets our need.
Before, we had a number of different systems in different countries and we did lots of travelling and field visits that we now don’t need to do. Now each centre has access to all the information it needs, due diligence can be carried out remotely and projects can be approved and signed off without the physical presence of a line manager. Similarly, for instance, a line manager in the UK can provide advice and support to colleagues anywhere in the world easily and efficiently.
Our processes were in place before lockdown started and very little changed, that’s our established way of working anyway.
What has maybe changed is our client market and now that we have seen how tech companies have seen something of a boom over the past few months, others may be struggling, and we will be looking at how we provide support to individual clients as they get back to ‘normal’ and going forward.
