A piece of marketing work at a company with Clorox's portfolio, Clorox, Pine-Sol, Glad, Kingsford, Burt's Bees, Brita, Hidden Valley, Fresh Step, passes through five hands: the brief, the estimate, the statement of work and purchase order, the delivery, the invoice. Each has a system of record. Whether a digital-first program is working comes down to one question that surveys cannot answer: did the work go through those systems, or around them?
This board reads the record and shows, for every job, which steps ran through the system of record and which ran through email, a spreadsheet, or a PDF. It changes nothing. It names where each step actually lives, so the tool that lost to email can be fixed instead of mandated.
The brand portfolio is public, from Clorox's investor site and annual report. Every job, agency, amount and date below is sample data generated for this page. No Clorox agency, spend figure, or internal system appears here.
Every job is the same chain. The board marks each station green when the record sits where it is supposed to, and red pen when it was found somewhere else.
System of record: the brand tracker. Found off-system as an email thread.
System of record: the agency portal. Found off-system as a PDF attachment.
System of record: sourcing, then P2P. Found off-system as a spreadsheet, or a PO raised after the invoice.
System of record: the brand tracker. Found off-system as a shared drive folder.
System of record: P2P. Found off-system as an emailed invoice with no PO to match.
Filter by brand, work type, or adoption. Select any row to open it and see, station by station, where the record was found and what it says.
| Job | Brand | Work type | Agency | Stage | Adoption | Estimate |
|---|
This page runs on sample data. The production board reads from the systems a marketing procurement team already runs, the brand tracker, the agency portal, sourcing, P2P, finance actuals, through access you issue and can take back. It does not grade anyone. It shows where the record is.
The board reads. It never writes back to P2P, sourcing, or the brand tracker, so nothing in a system of record changes because the board exists.
Access is limited to the jobs in scope. For a pilot, that means one brand's marketing spend, or one work type across brands, and nothing outside it.
Revoke the access key and the board goes dark. Nothing to uninstall, and no data left behind that you did not already hold.
Small enough to approve inside a Digital Excellence Center's own remit. Large enough to learn which station loses to email most, and why.
Connect one brand's marketing jobs through read-only access. The board fills from what already exists, and every station names where its record was found.
A weekly read with the marketing procurement lead and one brand team. Which station went off-system this week, which agency, and what the tool made harder than email.
Keep it and add a brand, or switch it off. Either answer is a clean one, and the off-system count on day 90 against day 1 is the adoption number.
Great Breads Studio is a design and technology studio in Harlem, New York. The studio designs and engineers systems for founders, brands, and public-sector clients, and builds its own software products alongside brand, web, and editorial work.
The studio built this board. It is shown here with sample data so it can be read without a login. The board makes no judgment about the people doing the work: a step found off-system usually means the tool was harder than email that day. The board shows the step so the tool can be fixed, and leaves the judgment to a person.