Excel was crushing their Corporate Communications team. Q1 was coming fast.
$26B global food & beverage · 40+ countries
The client
A $26 billion food and beverage powerhouse.
Third-largest in North America, fifth-largest worldwide, operating in over 40 countries with brands like Kraft, Heinz, and Philadelphia.
The challenge
Every communications initiative lived in Excel.
A corporate communications team at one of the world's largest food and beverage companies planned campaigns and coordinated marketing assets across the organization. The team was capable and productive. As campaign volume grew, so did the number of stakeholders, the assets in production, and the dependencies between teams. The structure coordinating that work had not kept pace.
Planning and production ran through a mix of spreadsheets, messages, and manually created tasks, with no single operational source of truth. Basic questions became difficult to answer: which campaigns were in motion, which content was in production, what was ready to publish, and what was blocked. The team held things together by hand, with more messages, more status checks, and more tasks created. Visibility depended on people remembering and relaying status.
- Multiple editorial calendars creating duplicate effort
- Approval processes requiring endless back-and-forth
- Manual tracking of timelines and costs, with frequent errors
- No project visibility across the team
- Unclear ownership of deliverables
- Inefficient intake causing constant delays
The breaking point: preparing for Q1 2024 with a system actively working against them.
The solution
The Marketing Command Center.
We designed and built it in Airtable — one place where a request becomes a project, a project has an owner, and the calendar is a consequence of the work rather than a second job.
Centralized project intake
Simplified requests, with immediate visibility into new initiatives the moment they arrive.
Unified project management
Streamlined tracking, clear ownership, and automatic status updates instead of chased ones.
Integrated editorial calendar
A live view of ongoing and upcoming work, which eliminated the duplication between calendars.
Work enters one way. The request carries its own brand, channel and dates, so nothing has to be chased before it can be scheduled. Demo environment, sample data.
The results
What changed.
After the architecture was in place, coordination became significantly easier. Campaign planning, production, and publishing were connected through one system. The team could see what work was in motion, what was ready for launch, and where the dependencies were.
- Reduced project turnaround by eliminating inefficient approvals and manual entry
- Improved visibility and ownership, with clear roles on every deliverable
- Eliminated redundant Excel spreadsheets, integrated into one platform
- Enhanced cross-team collaboration through centralized workflows
What changed was not only the tooling. Work that had been held together by messages and status checks now moved through a structure that carried it. Ownership of each deliverable was explicit. Redundant spreadsheets were retired into one platform. Project turnaround shortened because approvals stopped circling.
The system was handed over the way every Park West build is. It runs on the client's own data, wired into the tools the team already used, documented well enough that the people who use it every day can change it, and owned by them at the end rather than dependent on us.
The expansion
Success was dramatic enough that other departments took notice. The Command Center grew from the original team to four departments in total, and reached the North America and Europe regions, two of the three in Kraft Heinz's global operating structure.
In their words
“I was astounded by the team's ability to take our complicated direction and translate it into a system that was user-friendly, dynamic and intuitive.
It's been a complete game changer for our team.
We could not have created a bespoke and intelligent system like this without our partners.”
Cara Hays
Senior Manager of Integrated Content and Strategy
The Kraft Heinz Company
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