How Bio-Techne cut review rounds and review time in half with Ziflow

Here’s a scenario creative teams (and probably you!) know too well. You export a PDF, route it through Adobe Cloud, and ask people to leave comments using the built-in tool. Except half of them download the file to add their own notes, re-upload it, and now everyone’s comments are gone. It’s messy, it’s slow, and nobody’s ever quite sure they’re looking at the latest version.

That was par for the course for Jessica Tatge, manager of integrated marketing at Bio-Techne. After vetting a few different online proofing vendors, her team landed on Ziflow. The result? Review rounds cut in half, review time cut in half, and a video annotation capability they’d never had before.

Who is Bio-Techne?

Bio-Techne is a manufacturer and supplier of high-quality reagents used in everyday science. Their products show up in universities and pharmaceutical companies, where researchers rely on them to help find cures for diseases, develop cancer treatments, and create the medications that move medicine forward. When your work supports science at that level, precision is absolutely everything.

The challenge: a messy PDF-based review process

Bio-Techne’s old creative process depended on exporting an Adobe PDF and routing it through Adobe Cloud, then hoping people would use the PDF’s commenting tool correctly. They usually didn’t. Reviewers would download the file to make their own notes, re-upload it, and wipe out the comments that came before. Feedback got lost, and consolidating everything into something usable was a constant pain in the you-know-what.

How Ziflow transformed their review process

The annotation tools were the biggest sell. Being able to draw a box around an area or circle a specific detail made feedback precise in a way the PDF process never allowed. But the real game changer was video.

“Being able to pause a video at a certain time, timestamp it, and be able to comment in a video, that was a game changer for us. That’s something we’ve never been able to do before.”

For a team producing more video than ever with a full in-house video team, frame-accurate commenting drastically changed how they work. And the multi-stage routing gave them control over quality at every step. Bio-Techne runs three stages: a designer routes the proof to their art director first. If the art director spots something that isn’t brand compliant, they can stop the proof and send it back for changes before it ever reaches the end user.

“What we want to hit the end user is the near perfection piece.”

Then there’s the data. Bio-Techne tracks review metrics in their project management tool, and the numbers made the case on their own. The number of times work went out for review was cut in half, and so was the length of time it stayed out for review. As Jessica put it, “the data spoke for itself.”

Ziflow rolled out for marketing first, but the business users being routed material to review loved it so much they came back asking for more licenses. Now scientists at Bio-Techne use Ziflow to approve product content before it ever reaches the marketing team.

“They loved the tool so much that they came to us and said, ‘We need to buy more licenses.’”

Jessica’s verdict

One word to describe Ziflow? Collaborative. Being able to have the end user ask the designer questions about a piece before it’s finished has been huge, and Jessica credits that collaboration for the review-time savings. During the vetting process, Ziflow stood out for its UI where other platforms weren’t as intuitive. Add in the video annotation, and the choice was clear.

Watch the full story

Hear Jessica’s full take in the video below.

Ready to cut your review time in half?

If your team is still routing PDFs through email and losing comments along the way, there’s a better path. Ziflow centralizes feedback, supports video annotation, and gives you the multi-stage control to deliver near-perfect work. Get a demo today and see the difference for yourself.