How CEMEX reduced time-to-market by 15% with ClickUp

With manufacturing operations on four continents and 20,000 employees around the globe, CEMEX has a wide range of marketing needs. In recent years, the company’s leadership team set out to streamline and scale its marketing functions. They established an internal agency and center of excellence for producing creative and content: the CEMEX Content Studio.

However, the newly formed group of copywriters, graphic designers, and motion graphics creators lacked the foundational tools to truly scale operations.

“Everyone was working in silos,” says Oscar Aguilar, Marketing Operations Manager at CEMEX. “People and teams weren’t communicating on projects they were working on, so we were wasting a lot of time on duplicate work.”

Since no formal process existed to intake project requests, stakeholders would simply email or message individual team members. This made it difficult for project leaders to understand a team’s bandwidth and establish clear service level agreements.

So Oscar’s manager tasked him with finding a productivity platform that could help standardize marketing operations to save time and drive team efficiency.

A productivity platform that standardizes marketing operations

When Oscar began looking at ClickUp, he was immediately impressed by the automations and intuitive interface. These features quickly paid dividends, driving internal adoption and usage of the platform, and ultimately helping CEMEX save time, simplify work, and get more done.

In fact, it only took one week for CEMEX marketing team of 50 employees to make the switch from Wrike to ClickUp, thanks to the Migration API.

“ClickUp’s import and export process is so easy that we could complete it in a matter of hours without interrupting or conflicting with open projects,” Oscar says.

1. Improved project intake process

Gone are the days of a disorganized and chaotic project intake process. Now, CEMEX uses ClickUp’s Forms feature to manage project requests. When a stakeholder fills out a form to request a project, this automatically triggers the creation of a project with a custom template and directly assigns it to CEMEX’s marketing planning team.

2. Automations that get work flowing

CEMEX is no longer bogged down by manual work, thanks to ClickUp’s Automations and Templates features, which also play a role in the project intake process. Since form submissions automatically trigger a project with a custom template, this allows the marketing team to get to work faster.

“It’s been great, because the whole team follows up on their daily tasks in ClickUp,” says Oscar. “Before the automations, whenever a copywriter finished a task, we had to manually communicate up the chain of command that the copy was ready. That could take 36 hours.”

3. Streamlined processes with clearer dependencies

ClickUp’s task Relationships allows CEMEX to build streamlined workflows as projects move from project leads to copywriters to designers to motion graphics creators. By creating links between tasks, documents, and dependencies, employees can access everything they need in one place.

“We’re trying to create chains of validation to include the people that need to review creative work or ask for changes into our process. With ClickUp, this is no longer manual,” Oscar says.

4. Real-time visibility into work progress and team performance

CEMEX’s leadership team now has visibility into all marketing campaigns with ClickUp. The marketing team uses ClickUp’s Dashboards feature to create reports that provide insight into project statuses. Custom fields in Dashboards allow CEMEX to keep track of the data and key performance indicators that matter most to the company.

Reports also enable CEMEX to detect patterns in production and determine the busy times of year for the marketing team so they can better manage their workload.

“The whole team has a monthly check-in with our vice president of strategic planning, and we share all of our work and progress directly using ClickUp,” says Oscar. “This has saved us hours of time preparing for this meeting and has helped us provide a new-level of visibility to our management.”