Elite Marketing Group: Experiencing Transitional Success with Business Advisory Services

While experiential marketing and data capture seem like recent catchwords, Elite Marketing Group has been a market leader in these and many other innovative marketing practices for over thirty years. Based in Long Island, New York, Elite Marketing Group represents Fortune 500 companies in their customer acquisition marketing ventures and their experiential marketing programs. They are also responsible for helping to launch what they call the “Electronic Data capture revolution,” changing marketing as we know it.

For as cutting edge and forward thinking as Elite Marketing Group’s business model is, their business software processes were stuck in the last decade. Their accounting software wasn’t interfacing well with their in house marketing technology, adding a lot of manual effort to bill clients efficiently. Reporting was challenging as well. “Trying to get reporting for project costing—what is billed to a client, what is sent to a client—was difficult to say the least,” says Michelle Grover, Chief Financial Officer for Elite Marketing Group.

They recognized that they needed to move on from their older systems and processes, and chose to upgrade to the latest version of TRAVERSE business and accounting software from Open Systems, Inc. In order to make the transition to a new system as efficient as possible, Elite Marketing Group called on Business Advisory Services from Open Systems, Inc.

The experts in Business Advisory service stand ready to provide businesses with the tools, guidance, and information they need to take on the critical business changes and challenges. Working with the project managers at Elite Marketing Group, a plan began to take shape.

Taking time to understand the challenges

Business advisor Scott Buckelew went onsite with Elite Marketing Group to determine the best course of action. “After several days of reviewing their processes,” says Buckelew, “we decided they could be more effective in how they used project costing.” In transitioning from an older version of TRAVERSE business software from Open System to the latest version of TRAVERSE, they would be able to import data more easily from their in-house marketing system and their external payroll service. “Our goal was to help them minimize the amount of manual effort Elite Marketing Group had to do to achieve similar results,” says Buckelew.

Project Costing, revisited

Scott and trainer Linda Harris helped the Elite Marketing Group staff navigate the new TRAVERSE version 11 Project Costing system. “It’s a breath of fresh air,” says Grover. “We can easily get mini-profit and loss reports by project, by client.” The new system and procedures allow Elite Marketing Group to be more effective, both in the types of projects and revenue/expense allocations they use. “These processes save time,” says Grover, “which saves money.”

Getting and sharing information more easily

The new reporting tools in TRAVERSE version 11, coupled with the import/export capabilities, helped Elite Marketing Group capture more accurate information in less time. “The interactive views?” says Grover. “Our older version of TRAVERSE didn’t have anything like that.” The new kind of reporting engine allows Grover and her staff to retrieve, sort, and format information on the screen, and then export it into a variety of sharable formats. “You don’t have to spend the whole day formatting to deal with the information on the report."

Working together to achieve success

The Open Systems Business Advisors and Elite Marketing Group teams came together to solve the challenges of the upgrade process, making sure that they got exactly what they needed from their investment. “The willingness of the Elite project managers to share their resources and knowledge with us contributed greatly to the success of the project,” says Buckelew.

“Scott and Linda, they make me smile,” says Grover. “They completely understood where we were, where it didn’t work for us, and where we wanted to be. I found it very easy to work with them."