Company Profile
- Company Size: 1,000+ employees, distributed across multiple global offices
- Marketing Team Size: 130 marketing members, divided into specialized functions (brand, content, demand gen, events, digital)
- Stakeholder Reach: Supporting internal teams across functions and delivering work for external clients
The Challenge
Envision Pharma Group manages a high volume of marketing and creative deliverables, from scientific posters and brochures to data visualization, branding, animation, and websites.
Before Hive, the team relied on tools like Trello and Ganttic — but found them insufficient for the complexity of their workflows. The challenges included:
- Running two very different types of workflows (fast-paced publication projects vs. high-end creative deliverables with long timelines)
- Coordinating input across distributed teams and external stakeholders
- Needing visibility into project milestones without overloading every team member with unnecessary detail
- Juggling fragmented systems that slowed down collaboration and alignment
After more than three years of research, the team concluded that most solutions couldn’t meet their needs — and even considered building their own.
The Solution: Hive
The team adopted Hive in early 2022 as its single platform to plan, schedule, and manage marketing and creative workflows.
Why Hive?
Hive offered the flexibility, security, and enterprise-level functionality needed to bring campaign workflows, proofing/approvals, and stakeholder management into one system — while still being easy for cross-functional partners to adopt.
How the Team Uses Hive
1. Intake & Routing via Hive Forms
Project briefs enter through Hive Forms, ensuring the right information is captured from the start. Dynamic routing sends requests to the correct team, while data points can be quickly turned into reports for leadership.
2. Flexible Workflow Management
- Fast-paced workflows: The publication planning team uses Hive’s Status View (Kanban) to move through high-volume deliverables like posters and brochures.
- Longer-term workflows: The high-end deliverables team leverages Gantt charts and milestones to schedule and track projects like branding, animation, and data visualization.
This flexibility allows managers to balance resources — from designers working on eight projects in a day to developers focused on a four-week deliverable.
3. Collaboration & Record-Keeping
All task-specific notes, files, and updates are kept directly within Hive Action Cards, creating a single source of truth for each deliverable. This eliminates lengthy update meetings and provides an accessible history when new team members or external collaborators join a project.
“Having the history on the Action card is particularly useful when somebody new comes on to help out. Instead of a 40-minute meeting, we can say, ‘Have a read of the card first. If anything’s unclear, let’s chat. Otherwise, crack on.’”
— Simon Dempsey, Global Lead of Operations, Creative & Digital
Results
By centralizing intake, workflows, and collaboration in Hive, Envision Pharma Group has:
- Unified two distinct workflows into a single platform
- Reduced onboarding and update time for new collaborators
- Increased efficiency in managing both internal and external communications
- Created flexibility for managers to customize workflows and automations to their team’s needs
Conclusion
Hive’s adaptability allows enterprise marketing and creative teams like Envision Pharma Group to run multiple workflows at different speeds, collaborate effectively across stakeholders, and maintain full visibility without sacrificing flexibility.
