In the entertainment industry, speed is a competitive advantage. When an RFP is in play, every day of delay in the pre-sale process is a day closer to a missed opportunity. For a corporation with multiple creative and development teams working in parallel on different deals, the project management infrastructure that moves RFPs from intake to execution can’t afford to run on manual copy-paste and email.
This is how OrangeDot helped one of the world’s leading media corporations stop managing their process manually and start letting automation do the work.
What We’ll Cover
- About the client and the scale of their creative partnerships operation
- Challenge 1: RFPs moving from Salesforce to monday.com to creative teams entirely by manual copy-paste
- Challenge 2: Internal design requests routed through email with no automation, and inconsistent board structures across teams
- How OrangeDot mapped the full process flow and automated RFP routing from Salesforce through to creative teams
- How OrangeDot standardized board structures, added mirrored visibility, and replaced the TogetherWork intake process
- The combined impact: zero manual data transfer, standardized boards, and full cross-team visibility
About the client
This client is one of the world’s leading mass media and entertainment corporations, operating across multiple divisions with over 30,000 employees. In the entertainment industry, requests are constant, timelines are compressed, and deadlines are non-negotiable. The Creative Partnerships Project Management Team at the center of this engagement is responsible for managing a high volume of RFP pre-sale workflows — coordinating across marketing, creative, and development teams to get the right people working on the right opportunities as quickly as possible.
For three years, that coordination had been happening manually in monday.com. The platform was there. The automation wasn’t.
Two manual processes, one underlying problem
The Creative Partnerships team had two distinct workflows that both suffered from the same root cause: data was moving between systems and teams by human hands rather than by automation, creating delay, duplication, and a constant risk of error. The first was the RFP pipeline flowing from Salesforce through the One Platform Marketing (OPM) team to the One Platform Creative & Development (OPCD) teams. The second was the internal design request process managed by the Portfolio team. Both needed to be automated. Neither had been.
The team had built a lead process in Salesforce that was integrated with monday.com. When an RFP reached a certain deal stage in Salesforce, the data was pushed to the OPM team’s monday.com board. From there, every subsequent step was manual. The OPM team reviewed each item individually, determined which OPCD team or teams should handle the pre-sale work, and then manually copied and pasted the data from the OPM board to the appropriate OPCD team boards.
That manual transfer introduced significant risk at every step. Column structures differed between the OPM board and the various OPCD boards, making accurate data transfer time-consuming and error-prone. Fields could be missed, data could be entered incorrectly, and items could be routed to the wrong team. In an environment where multiple RFPs were moving through the system simultaneously under non-negotiable deadlines, those errors had real consequences.
Compounding the structural problem was the inconsistency between OPCD team boards themselves. Each team had developed its own board layout with different columns, which made standardizing the transfer process nearly impossible and prevented leadership from getting a consistent view across all active pre-sale work.
When data flows between systems through manual copy-paste, every transfer is both a time cost and a risk. At enterprise scale, with multiple RFPs moving across multiple teams simultaneously under tight deadlines, that risk isn’t a minor operational inconvenience — it’s a structural vulnerability. The answer isn’t to ask people to be more careful. It’s to remove the manual step entirely.
Separately, the Portfolio team — which handled both internal design requests and pre-sale RFP work — was managing its request intake through a form in TogetherWork, a third-party platform. When a team member submitted a request, the Portfolio team received the form details in an email and then manually copied that information into an item on their monday.com board. Like the RFP pipeline, this process was time-consuming and introduced another point of failure where data could be lost, miscopied, or delayed.
There was also no structured notification system in place. Teams weren’t automatically informed when new items were created, when statuses changed, or when work was reassigned. The absence of reliable notifications meant that updates had to be communicated manually — adding yet another layer of coordination overhead to an operation that was already running too manually.
A request intake process that routes through email before reaching the system that manages the work isn’t a workflow — it’s a gap in a workflow. The form data that should flow directly into monday.com is instead landing in an inbox, waiting for someone to find it, transcribe it, and hope they got it right. That gap is solvable, and solving it should have been the first automation the team implemented.
The solution part one: mapping the process and automating RFP routing
End-to-end process flow mapping before any automation
OrangeDot began by thoroughly mapping the current process flows for both the lead pipeline and creative team requests — documenting every step, every handoff, and every point where manual work was being performed. This mapping exercise surfaced not just the obvious automation opportunities but also the edge cases and exception handling that any robust automation layer needs to account for.
Condition-based automatic routing from OPM to OPCD teams
For RFPs with sufficient data coming in from Salesforce, OrangeDot implemented automations on the OPM team board that evaluate each incoming item against a defined set of conditions. When those conditions are met, the RFP is automatically copied to the correct OPCD team board — with no manual review or data transfer required. The routing logic reflects the actual criteria the OPM team had been applying manually, now running automatically at the moment the item lands.
Status-triggered routing for items requiring manual review
In cases where an incoming RFP doesn’t have enough information from Salesforce to trigger automatic routing, the OPM team still reviews the item manually to fill in necessary details. OrangeDot implemented complementary automations that activate when the OPM team member changes the item’s Status column. Once the review is complete, a single status change automatically handles the item copy and board transfer to the appropriate OPCD team — dramatically reducing the effort required even when manual review is unavoidable.
The solution part two: standardized boards, mirrored visibility, and automated intake
Full board audit and structural standardization
OrangeDot conducted a comprehensive audit of all OPCD team boards, analyzing their existing structures and identifying the standardization required to make cross-board automation and visibility work reliably. New column types were introduced consistently across all boards. A “Connect Boards” column was added to both the OPM board and all OPCD boards: when an item is copied to an OPCD board, it automatically links back to its original record on the OPM board, and the original item moves to the “Working” group so the OPM team always knows which items are in active pre-sale work.
Mirrored columns for cross-team visibility without board-switching
Mirrored columns allow the OPM team to see corresponding creative and development managers, the OPCD lead assigned to each project, the current status of pre-sale work, and important links — all from within their own board. Communication on shared items is mirrored as well: using “@everyone on this item” notifies both OPM and OPCD members simultaneously. The OPM team has full visibility into in-progress OPCD RFP pre-sale work without ever needing to navigate to a different board.
Portfolio team trigger from OPCD boards
For OPCD teams that may need the Portfolio team’s design support on a project, OrangeDot added two columns to the relevant boards: a “Details for Creative Team” field and a “Creative Team Needed?” status column. Changing the status column triggers an automation that duplicates the item directly into the Portfolio team’s board and notifies the Portfolio team that a request has been sent. OPCD teams can loop in design support with a single status change.
Internal Requests board replacing TogetherWork email intake
OrangeDot recreated the Portfolio team’s request form natively within monday.com, eliminating the TogetherWork dependency and the email-to-board transcription step entirely. A new Internal Requests board was created with an attached monday.com form that collects the same information the original form gathered. Submissions arrive directly in the board and notify relevant users immediately. Requests are reviewed from the board using a Status column: when accepted, the request is automatically copied to the Portfolio team’s working board so they can begin work without any additional manual action.
Notification automations and ongoing support
Notification automations were implemented across all boards to ensure OPCD teams are immediately informed about new requests, deal assignments, and status changes. OrangeDot built sandbox boards to test all automations before going live, then delivered hands-on training for all relevant teams covering the updated process flows and the logic behind each automation. An issue tracking board was created to manage any post-launch complications, with an ongoing support contract in place to ensure long-term operational stability.
The combined impact
Elimination of duplicative and inaccurate data
With automated routing replacing manual copy-paste across every transfer point in the workflow, the duplicative and inaccurate data that had been accumulating in the client’s monday.com instance was eliminated. Items now arrive in the right place, with the right data, without any manual transcription step that could introduce error.
Standardized processes across all creative teams
The board audit and structural standardization gave every OPCD team a consistent foundation to work from. Column structures are aligned, automation logic applies uniformly, and cross-board visibility through mirrored columns means the OPM team can see the status of all pre-sale work from a single view — without needing OPCD teams to separately report on their progress.
Project management and task delegation that actually works at scale
With automation handling the routing, the Portfolio team request intake, and the notification layer, the teams involved in this workflow can now focus on the pre-sale work itself rather than the administrative overhead of managing how that work moves between teams. In an industry where speed is a competitive advantage, removing the manual delays from the project management process isn’t just an operational improvement — it’s a direct enabler of better business outcomes.
30,000+ employees · Salesforce-to-monday.com pipeline fully automated · All OPCD team boards standardized and mirrored · Zero manual copy-paste between boards or systems
FAQs
How does the Salesforce-to-monday.com integration work in this context?
OrangeDot works as a trusted partner of both monday.com and Salesforce, which means the team understands how to design integrations that account for the specific ways data flows between both platforms. In this case, the existing Salesforce integration was already pushing RFP data to monday.com when deals reached a certain stage. OrangeDot built the automation layer on the monday.com side that evaluates incoming items against routing conditions and distributes them to the correct OPCD boards automatically — so the integration does the work that had previously required manual review and copy-paste.
What happens when an RFP doesn’t have enough data from Salesforce to trigger automatic routing?
OrangeDot designed the system to handle exceptions gracefully. When an incoming item lacks the data needed to meet the automatic routing conditions, it stays in the OPM team’s review queue. The OPM team member completes the necessary fields, and a single status change triggers the same routing and transfer automation that would have applied automatically. The manual review still happens when it’s genuinely needed — but the subsequent distribution work is fully automated regardless.
How do mirrored columns maintain visibility across teams without requiring everyone to access each other’s boards?
monday.com’s mirrored columns allow specific fields from one board to be reflected in another, updating in real time when the source data changes. In this implementation, the OPM team can see OPCD project status, lead assignments, and communication history from their own board — without navigating to the OPCD boards directly. Changes made on the OPCD side appear in the OPM view immediately. This shared visibility without board-switching reduces coordination overhead and keeps the OPM team informed at all times about the status of pre-sale work they’ve routed out.
What does the training and ongoing support component look like for an engagement this complex?
OrangeDot built sandbox environments that replicated all automation logic before going live, allowing the team to test every workflow in a controlled setting and surface any issues before they affected real work. Training was delivered at a high level across all relevant teams, covering the updated process flows, the logic behind key automations, and how to handle the scenarios where manual judgment is still required. An issue tracking board was created for post-launch issue management, and an ongoing support contract ensures that as the organization’s needs evolve, the automation infrastructure can evolve with them.
Final thoughts
Three years is a long time to use a platform without automating it. But it’s also a common story: teams adopt monday.com for its organizational capabilities, build workflows that work well enough manually, and don’t take the next step toward automation until the manual work becomes genuinely unsustainable. For a 30,000-employee entertainment corporation managing complex multi-team pre-sale workflows under non-negotiable deadlines, that point had arrived.
The solution OrangeDot built wasn’t just a set of automations — it was a restructured system. Process flow mapping, board standardization, cross-team visibility, and a full intake replacement all combined into a platform that finally reflects the complexity of the operation it supports. The manual work that had been holding the team back is gone, and what replaced it is faster, more reliable, and built to scale.
If your team has been using monday.com for years without automating the manual work that’s still happening between your tools and boards, we can help you close that gap. Talk to an OrangeDot expert →