My Work


As a Customer Solutions Engineer, my role involves working with some of the best companies in the world to help them achieve their goals through marketing and technology. While sometimes transformative, a lot of this work never sees the light. However, I am very happy to see some of our customers talking about the impact of the work we do.

[Grab](https://www.grab.com/sg/) is a SuperApp based in South East Asia. When they came to talk to us, they told us the **challenges they faced to achieve their marketing objectives**. Grab is a very flexible and fast moving company, but the campaign management activities could not keep up with the speed of their performance marketing strategies.

The **complexities of Grab business involved multiple markets, cities, products and languages**; whereas their marketing team wanted to work with multiple themes, promotions and optimisation goals. All with a **clear objective**: **improve their marketing results** through creative optimisation, by testing and experimenting with new ideas and themes.

This complexity was not only expensive to sustain on their marketing team, but also was slowing them down and preventing them to experiment with new alternatives more often.

We worked with the Grab marketing and engineering teams to **design a creative automation project** which would allow to manage all this complexity based on their creative naming and make the creative upload and replacement a seamless process.

The results: faster creative processes, **lower campaign management costs and a 30% increase in conversion rates**. Another success story of how Automation can completely transform any business unit.

*Read the full article on Grab's Engineering blog: [How Grab Leveraged Performance Marketing Automation to Improve Conversion Rates by 30%](https://engineering.grab.com/learn-how-grab-leveraged-performance-marketing-automation)*


As a Customer Solutions Engineer, my role involves working with some of the best companies in the world to help them achieve their goals through marketing and technology. When they came to talk to us, Grab told us the challenges they faced to achieve their marketing objectives. We worked with their marketing and engineering teams to design a creative automation project. The results: faster creative processes, lower campaign management costs and a 30% increase in conversion rates. Another success story of how Automation can completely transform any business unit.

How Grab increased their conversion rate by 30% with Marketing Automation


The [e-Conomy SEA 2020 report](https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-economy-sea.appspot.com/assets/pdf/e-Conomy_SEA_2020_Report.pdf) estimates the **digital economy of the South East Asia region in USD$100bn; with e-Commerce being the main contributor** and having significantly accelerated this growth due to the pandemic. Small business turned into digital; and, in many cases, this meant selling through some of the [largest marketplaces in the region](https://www.webretailer.com/b/online-marketplaces-southeast-asia/).

As a Technical Solutions Manager, my job involves partnering with some of the largest companies in the world to bring the best of Google to businesses around the world. We recently **partnered with Shopee to bring Google Ads to their Brands and sellers**, both large and small. We are very proud of the work that was done by both teams and which led to **launching of Google Ads with Shopee**.

We hope this will allow Brands and sellers to **grow their businesses** through the best of Google and Shopee.

*Read the full press release on Sea's media site: [Shopee and Google launch Google Ads with Shopee](https://www.sea.com/media/124)*


The South East Asia economy is estimated to be $100bn, a lot of which is driven by the rapid growth of e-Commerce during the pandemic. This created a huge opportunity for us to help new business turning into digital and make them successful. We partnered with Shopee to launch Google Ads with Shopee and help Brands and sellers to grow their businesses.

Growing the digital economy with Shopee: launching Google Ads with Shopee


During near two years, I worked for @IEBSchool, as a product manager for @OpenIEBS (a course-based open e-learning platform, today called [Citius School](https://www.citiuschool.com/)).

During my time there, I had the challenging task of **increasing the portfolio of available courses with minimal investment**; just by tapping into the already existing pool of resources of the company.

## The challenge: bandwidth was a growth constrain

Very early, I learned that this was not as easy as it seemed. In general, the limitation of having to stick to idle capacity made me explore all the different processes and teams of the company **looking for bottlenecks which prevented the new platform to get the resources needed to grow**.

There was a large variety of teams involved in the process: from Customer Care to Finance, from Engineering to Marketing. All of them were at a large occupation. However, from all of them, our **content producing team was the busiest** and had the least available bandwidth.

This team is responsible for **validating and creating the materials used for each lesson**. This is a **critical process for the business**. The content is consumed by our students and it is of paramount importance for their learning experience.

The team receives the actual content from our various instructors, professors and guest speakers. Then, the content is made available on the platform and **adapted to our quality and style guidelines**.

As the portfolio of the company is quite varied; the team was tasked with **preparing a large amount of lessons each week** and had **very little capacity** to do anything else. This was a huge problem because the **new platform required** a large amount of **courses to be successful**.

While the school had the content to deliver new courses, the team was unable to prepare them at the pace required. In other words, the **platform could not grow at the speed we wanted because there was a bottle neck in the material preparation process**.

## Exploring the workflow of content creation

I decided to immerse myself with the team and help them in the process of creating new contents. I soon realised how manual and tedious large part of the process was.

This is how the main workflow looked like:

1. Professor or guest lecturers will send materials for each lesson to the team. The materials will come in any format / style the creator would consider.

1. Our team would review the materials to ensure the quality was good. If it didn’t meet our standards, recommendations would be sent to the instructor to improve the content.

1. Once ready, the team would add the content to the e-learning platform, following our style standards and tools.

1. The team would then create a PDF version, going again through the same process of applying style and using a different set of tools.

The process could take about somewhere in the range of 2–4 hours per lesson; depending on the length of the materials. The **validation task is the most important one**, as it ensures the quality meets our students needs. However, the two **most expensive tasks were the creation of the materials**, on both the platform and PDF version. These were the **least value added processes**, and **yet, the most costly tasks on the workflow**. These two steps combined could take up to 80% of the time (1.5h–3h).

More importantly, this process was not only for our new platform, but for all the masters and programs that were done on the Business School. As a result, this workflow was **one of the main costs to expand our portfolio**.

## Analysing the cost of the process

While the actual numbers cannot be shared, let’s run some quick numbers.

If the business school had a portfolio of 20 masters, with an average of 15 modules each and 4 lessons per module; this means that 1,200 lessons would need to be created per semester, or 2,400 lessons per year.

Assuming that this would take an average of 3 hours, this is 7,200 hours per year only for preparing the materials. Assuming an estimate of 1,800 hours per year per worker, this means that **you would need 4 full time employees working only on preparing materials** (7,200 hours / 1,800 hours per employee per year). While not huge, it is a significant investment for a relatively trivial, but critical, process.

This investment was alone for the master programs. The new platform was requiring hundreds of new additional courses, which could have driven the cost up significantly.

## How could the School reduce this investment?

### First approach: crowdsourcing and collaboration

The first investment we decided to take was **investing in crowdsourcing** the creation of materials. We opened our content creation tools so **all instructors could edit their own materials** on the platform directly and even collaborate with others.

This already had a significant impact on the process and worked very well in some courses in OpenIEBS. Our **team could work over the first input submitted by the instructors**, and simply adapt it to our requirements.

This reduced the time required for our team to get the materials prepared. Instead of adapting to any formats received and submit it to our e-learning site, the content was already in the platform ready to be reviewed and modified.

Despite this, **a lot of tasks were still needed**, like creating the PDFs or validating the content. Let’s not forget that the PDF creation still could take over an hour per lesson.

Additionally, this **brought other issues**.

The team had to **invest resources on teaching the instructors how to use the platform**; which was far from free. Even after this, some instructors were unhappy about the lengthy process and were unlikely to create more materials due to the high cost for them.

The **loss of control on the review process** made it **difficult** for the content to have the full **quality control we wanted**. Instructors could make changes at any time without our team noticing; which could lead to unreviewed material, bad style guides or discrepancies with the PDF copies. This was specially not acceptable for any of our programs.

We needed a different approach.

### Second approach: automating redundant tasks

When reviewing the creation process, one could easily spot the problem: the **content creation task was duplicated**! The team had to add and style the materials on our platform; and then do exactly the same for the PDF version! This felt very redundant when I shadowed the team. Yet, no one had thought of this duplication before.

Once the content was input on the system, this was already available on a database. Why would we need to apply the same steps again just to create a PDF copy? Once the **content was digitalised**, there were multiple libraries that could **convert the text and style into PDFs of the max quality** with no additional effort.

Our engineering team took less than a week to incorporate the feature request to automate the PDF creation. Since this task was about half of the time, this **allowed us to produce materials at double the speed than before**. Not only this, but on the crowdsourced model, this ensured that the PDFs were always up to date **and of the best quality** as its creation was fully automated.

## The impact of automating PDF creation

### Time savings: about half of the original cost

Before, we talked about the cost of this process to create 2,400 lessons per year was 4 full time employees. If we managed to save 1.5h per lesson, **this saved** us 3,600 hours (2,400 lessons per year x 1.5 h) per year; or, **2 full time employees** (3,600 hours / 1,800 hours per year per employee).

While this represents half of the team, this story is **not just about time savings**. Half of our content creation team was not fired overnight.

Instead, we **doubled the investment in high quality value tasks** like reviewing the materials and making proactive suggestions to our instructors, which really **improved the overall quality of the materials**.

Additionally, the bandwidth was no longer as constrained, and allowed us to **create additional capacity to tackle the expansion of our new platform**, which required a lot of their help to be successful. This way, the initial savings transformed into a **new avenue of revenue for the company**, and some successes down the line.

## Conclusion

The business school was able to **save important resources by automating** a part of the workflow of material creation (one of our critical tasks).

The savings were not only significant in time and economic resources; but the **additional capacity allowed us to increase the overall quality** of the programs **and explore new avenues of revenue** quicker.

All by simply stopping, thinking critically about the work, realising about the small numbers adding up and solving the quick win.


During my time in OpenIEBS, I had the challenging task of increasing the portfolio of available courses with minimal investment. Very early, I learned that this was not as easy as it seemed. In general, the limitation of having limited capacity made me explore all the different processes and teams of the company looking for bottlenecks which prevented the new platform to get the resources needed to grow. This is how Automation helped us improve quality and create a new revenue stream for the company.

Nito Buendia

My Work blog posts

How Grab increased their conversion rate by 30% with Marketing Automation

Growing the digital economy with Shopee: launching Google Ads with Shopee

Case study: Automating a critical workflow for an online business school