Merrill Lynch is one of the world's leading financial management and advisory companies. Global Private Client (GPC) group of Merrill Lynch, the largest business of its kind in the world, provides investment, insurance, banking and retirement services for individuals and businesses. They clearly needed help in terms of project tracking. They had hundreds of collateral and local advertising projects. With this sheer volume of work and a complex matrix of products and customers, the marketing team had to be efficient, accurate and highly productive. Any miscommunication, mistake or rework caused a ripple effect that affected many other team members and projects. And in an increasingly competitive financial services marketplace, shorter cycle-times from campaign conception to market delivery can mean the difference between success and failure. The GPC Marketing team had to be coordinated and their efforts had to be on target and on time.

In 2002, Merrill Lynch's GPC Marketing team successfully implemented Aprimo's Planning & Financial Management solution to better manage their $100 million-plus marketing spend. This deployment enabled them to streamline the marketing budgeting process, spot inconsistencies from projected budgets to actual spends across all agencies and vendors and dramatically improve response time for financial report requests.

The success of this marketing financial management system led Merrill Lynch's GPC Marketing team back to Aprimo to extend their vision of an Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM) system to include planning and production management. They realized that they required a centralized system for their planning and marketing production needs, one that was flexible and easily configurable by their own marketing team members. They found their answer with Aprimo and expanded their Aprimo system with Aprimo's web-based Production Management & Production Managment product, including Marketing Planner, Digital Asset Manager, Reporting and the Integration Workbench. This second phase deployment, which went live in June 2003, enabled the Merrill Lynch team to realize their vision of a Production Management & Workflow solution that is a single, centralized repository for all GPC collateral and local advertising projects.