Have you ever wanted to know what your average retouching lead time is, and in what direction it’s trending?
Do you want to be able to hold your retouching service accountable on quality, reliability, and all the terms of your SLA?
Now you can.
Pixelz Pulse surfaces retouching KPIs
Data, Transparency, and More Data
Two of Pixelz’ core values are:
Let Data Decide
Be passionate, but be objective. Make evidence-based decisions.
Build Genuine Relationships
We’re in it for the long-term. Treat colleagues and customers openly and honestly.
Because we believe so much in the value of data and in being transparent, we’ve redesigned the Professional user dashboard to bring you Pixelz Pulse.
It surfaces up to the minute data you can use to get deeper insights into your post-production KPIs.
We’re also putting your Service Level Agreement front and center, so you can compare it to your Pulse and measure our performance.
Without further ado, here’s our shiny new dashboard:
Pixelz dashboard on login
Let’s take a closer look.
We’re going to go slightly out of order and review the Service Level Agreement before breaking down the Pulse.
SLAs
Your personal Service Level Agreement
First, please note that this new dashboard is only for Professional tier users at launch. We’ll be rolling it out to Enterprise in the near future and to SOLO later in the year.
Your SLAs (Service Level Agreement) are the level of service Pixelz has promised you.
This example screenshot is almost standard for Professional.
It promises next morning turnaround by 9:00 a.m. for all images uploaded by midnight user time. That’s true up to the “Guaranteed Daily Capacity,” which is “Custom” in the screenshot, as opposed to the standard 200 images for Pro. (Yes, you can contact us and negotiate custom SLAs.)
Up to 20 images can be expedited per day in 3 hours or less. If you’re not already familiar, to expedite you simply click an “expedite” button on an image or order. It doubles the price of that image, but you’ll get it back lightning fast.
Finally, we guarantee images will be delivered on quality. If they’re not, they can be rejected and will be returned within 5 hours—for free.
PRODUCTIVITY
Images uploaded this calendar month
Productivity is your total image counter.
The primary number is how many images you’ve uploaded for retouching the last 30 days.
The trend arrow and percentage compares the last 30 days with the previous 30 days.
And to give your current productivity context, we keep a running count of your all-time images processed.
QUALITY
First-time image approval rate
Quality measures how many images are successful on first delivery the last 30 days.
The last 30 days are compared to the previous 30 days to create your trend data.
We guarantee your images will be delivered on quality. That means if they don’t meet your standards, you can reject them and we’ll return them within SLA time for free.
TIME SAVINGS
Time saved using Pixelz
Time Savings measures how many hours you’ve saved in-house the last 30 days.
If you’re trying to determine the cost-benefit of performing post-production in-house versus using a retouching service, it’s a pretty useful number to know.
You might think this is an hours tracker for Pixelz retouchers, but it’s not exactly. Mostly because we have been steadily automating retouching for years in order to improve consistency and efficiency.
However, we do have terabytes of data tracking all the operations we’ve performed editing over 39 million images and counting. And because we isolate steps in order to automate and train specialist editors, we have a very good idea of the standard image processing time for individual steps by a retoucher, regardless of whether that step is currently being handled by a retoucher, script, or AI.
So your time savings are the sum expected timings for each retouching step your image passes through, if it were performed by a median human retoucher.
Hopefully your eyes didn’t glaze over there.
The takeaway should be that while this isn’t an exact punch-in punch-out timer for all of your images, we’re not pulling this number out of thin air either. It should be pretty accurate.
PRODUCTIVITY STREAK
Consecutive weeks uploading images
Productivity Streak counts how many consecutive weeks you’ve uploaded images for processing.
It’s nice to know when you’re in a rhythm.
Quite a few people saw interruptions due to COVID, but it’s time to get your streak going again!
RELIABILITY
Rate of image delivery within SLA deadline
Reliability measures how many images were delivered on-time the last 30 days, as determined by your SLA.
This is a binary metric. Either an image is on-time or it’s not.
Reliability is one of the most important qualities for any retouching service to provide, so we want to be completely transparent around delivery times—and to be held accountable if we’re ever late—even if it’s only a matter of minutes.
We’re proud to say we saw no operational impact due to COVID, and have been able to deliver on-time throughout the crisis. Learn more about our retouching risk mitigation strategies.
AVERAGE LEAD TIME
Average time between image upload and delivery
Average Lead Time measures the average amount of time from image upload to delivery the last 30 days.
It gives you deeper insight beyond the binary SLA of on-time or not.
Note that the trend in this instance is red! That means the lead time in the current period is slower than in the previous period. We will own up to negatives.
The arrow is still pointing up, because the lead time is going up. It may be a little counter-intuitive, but pointing down didn’t really make sense. There just isn’t a perfect mental map solution.
Out of all your Pulse numbers, you can probably expect the most fluctuation here. Average lead time is a number we're always trying to drive down, but as an average it's more sensitive to circumstance and volume.
Our automated traffic control routes images through our lean digital production depending on the deadline of every single image in the system, which is how we’re able to maintain such a high Reliability Rate. We’re always getting your images back to you as fast as possible—and are extremely aware of your SLA—but lead time will be affected by just how many other images are in the system at any given time, and their respective deadlines.
If you really want to see an astonishing low lead time for your studio as a whole—not just retouching—you should look into Flow production. It’s how major enterprise photo studios are increasing throughput while slashing lead times.
ORDER FEED
Quick status and link to last 10 retouching orders
Order Feed shows your most recent orders and their status.
You can click on an order to go to it, or press the “+” button to place a new order. You can also filter to just “In Production” or “Ready for Download” with the dropdown menu in the top right corner.
And we've added a preview thumbnail to make it easier to identify orders at a glance.
Up to 10 orders will be listed.
Conclusion
And that’s it! You should now have deeper, more useful insight into your retouching data.
We hope this change helps you take more informed decisions and helps us all identify improvement opportunities. If you have data you’d like to see surfaced, please tell us—we’re always working to improve the platform.
Remember, right now this new dashboard is limited to Professional subscribers only. Enterprise should see it in the near future, and we’ll be rolling it out to SOLO users and Professional trial users later this year.
If you have any questions, or if you want to see about adjusting your SLAs, please don’t hesitate to contact Customer Success.
