How a leading hardware retailer built an operational powerhouse with Wrike

Sarah Ogalla, Creative Operations Director at one of the leading North American hardware retailers, relies on a small but mighty four-person team to coordinate complex marketing initiatives across multiple cross-functional departments. With thousands of neighborhood stores, maintaining brand consistency and executing high-impact creative campaigns is no small feat. 

To meet this massive demand, Sarah turned to Wrike to build an adaptive, stage-aware operational engine powered by intelligent automation, standardized workflows, and AI. By eliminating tedious administrative overhead and centralizing project visibility, her small team transformed Wrike from a management tool into a true operational accelerator. This shift enabled four people to seamlessly power enterprise-wide campaigns, speed up time-to-market, and preserve room for high-impact creative strategy.

Before overhauling their systems, the creative team struggled with resource allocation and project prioritization. 

Faced with an increasingly complex volume of creative requests, tracking individual workloads was a highly manual and unpredictable process. To maximize her team’s output, Sarah leveraged Wrike to build a tailored ‘booked effort’ and ‘project priority’ framework. “By implementing a ‘booked effort’ and ‘project priority’ framework within Wrike, we were able to gain full visibility into individual workloads and overall team bandwidth,” Sarah explained.

This newfound visibility allowed the team to scope, assign, and forecast project timelines with precise accuracy. Turnaround times for quick-win deliverables dropped immediately, ensuring that high-impact, strategic initiatives received the dedicated focus they deserved.

“This streamlined process not only improved efficiency and resource allocation but also fostered greater team alignment and stakeholder satisfaction,” Sarah shared. “Wrike became our single source of truth.”

In fact, one could argue that what Sarah actually built in Wrike goes beyond a single source of truth. She described it as a “stage-aware, adaptive system that evolves with the lifecycle of work.” This involved streamlining the creative team’s Wrike instance to fewer than 20 highly intentional blueprints and 40 high-impact custom fields — each mapped to a specific stage of delivery. 

She even consolidated and redefined custom item types to clarify ownership, intent, and timing, which meant that users only saw information relevant to their role at the current project stage. Project intake became the team’s automation engine: Wrike custom request forms that used brief, dynamic questions to drive project creation by auto-populating fields, triggering automations, and conditionally adding or removing tasks based on responses. 

This meant that Sarah’s team could stop setting up the exact same things over and over again, and instead trust Wrike to automatically pass details like creative notes and project rules from the planning stage straight to the actual design tasks. “The result has been a system designed for high volume work to move elegantly, not mechanically,” Sarah said. 

The results speak for themselves: 

• Project early execution time dropped by 60%
• System maintenance decreased by 80%
• Consistency improved across more than 30 users

And most importantly, Wrike evolved from an administrative tool into a true operational accelerator, showing that innovation lies in designing smarter systems that grow alongside the teams using them.

Instead of relying on intuition and guesswork, Sarah utilized Wrike's reporting and analytics to identify exactly where projects were getting stuck. By analyzing historical task data and project status trends, the team uncovered an unexpected roadblock.

“We used Wrike reports to analyze bottlenecks and saw that 25% of tasks were getting delayed at the review stage,” Sarah recounted.

Armed with this concrete data, Sarah adjusted project timelines and introduced earlier approval checkpoints. This proactive shift yielded an immediate 30% improvement in delivery times for all subsequent projects.

To prevent future communication gaps, the team also leveraged Wrike's proofing and approvals tools. Rather than letting critiques get lost in long, disconnected email threads, stakeholders began leaving precise, contextual feedback directly on creative assets. This drastically reduced the number of revision rounds and helped the brand maintain its high standards for executional quality.

The company’s promotional calendar relies heavily on major campaign milestones, particularly its massive circular launches. Historically, coordinating these initiatives was a lengthy, manual endeavor, taking upwards of 26 weeks from the initial brief to final execution.

Sarah transformed this process by building structured, repeatable workflows in Wrike. She leveraged Wrike’s project blueprints to map out key campaign phases, including briefing, creative development, approvals, and deployment. The new workflows also involved task dependencies and predefined ownership, vastly improving task accountability.

To streamline incoming needs, Sarah set up custom request forms. Creative briefs, legal reviews, and media specs were gathered upfront and routed automatically to the correct workstreams, eliminating back-and-forth communication.

This standardization resulted in outstanding benefits:

This six-week speed-to-market acceleration allowed the team to launch campaigns in tight alignment with retail stakeholders, reducing miscommunication and increasing on-time delivery rates by a staggering 40%.

In a creative team, protecting time for emotional storytelling is paramount. So for Sarah, the goal of implementing operational structure is really to eliminate time-consuming admin and release the team to explore and take risks. 

To that end, Sarah focuses heavily on an ‘80/20 rule’, which involves her team spending less than 20% of their day on administrative work, such as email, chat, and manually updating tasks. This allows them to spend 80% on high-impact partner relationships, design, and strategy.

Embracing AI as a force multiplier played a massive role in hitting this target. The creative team trained a custom Wrike Brand Voice Agent loaded with Ace’s extensive, 60-page brand guidelines. Now, instead of bogging down designers with minor copy requests like email subject lines or quick headline tweaks, other departments can query the Brand Voice Agent in coordination with briefs and project details in Wrike.

“AI alone cannot replace the human touch required for real consumer connection, but it is incredible for removing the mundane,” Sarah noted. “By leveraging technology and automating repetitive clicks and task handoffs in Wrike, we've actively reduced cognitive load, freed up bandwidth, and built an environment of sustainable performance and growth.”

For a lean, four-person team supporting a sprawling company as sprawling as, context could easily get lost between inboxes, meeting notes, and project files. To close that gap, Sarah tightly integrated Wrike with the Microsoft ecosystem, connecting emails and meeting notes from Teams and Outlook directly to Wrike tasks. Instead of searching across platforms to piece together project history, the team could go to one place to automatically view all project details.

The team took this a step further by integrating Wrike with Microsoft Copilot to automate early-stage planning. Working from real-time Wrike data, Copilot reviews incoming briefs, flags missing requirements, supports project setup, and surfaces risks before they become bottlenecks. Tasks that once demanded manual review and repeated setup are now handled through AI-assisted execution, freeing Sarah's team to focus on judgment calls rather than paperwork.

By replacing fragmented, manual processes with intelligent automation, Wrike evolved into a smooth, scalable engine that saves time, reduces risk, and lets the team focus on delivering high-quality work.

The true test of Wrike's scalability came during a company-wide initiative to launch an entirely new department. The massive project spanned across marketing, creative, digital, and media teams, requiring supreme operational alignment.

To manage the complexity, Sarah built a custom Wrike workspace that housed every workstream, each with its own timelines, owners, and milestones — all while maintaining centralized visibility for executive leadership. She used Wrike blueprints to customize the project experience to fit the unique requirements of the launch, drastically reducing initial setup time.

To keep up momentum, Sarah created a live campaign dashboard in Wrike to give executives real-time, transparent progress tracking. 

The initiative not only elevated the brand’s market presence but also solidified Wrike's position as the company’s go-to system for cross-functional execution, setting a brand-new operational standard for collaborative success across all departments.