Posted on Mon, Apr. 26, 2004
BEATRICE E. GARCIA: Chat Room

OmniPilot Software got its start as an application intended to help Starmark International, a Fort Lauderdale-based corporate ad agency, manage its internal operations more efficiently.

But the software has worked so well that people who visited Starmark and learned about it soon began asking if they could purchase copies for use at the agencies where they worked.

So a new company was born earlier this year. Today, OmniPilot Software is a wholly owned unit of Starmark International.

OmniPilot's initial application, known as OmniPilot Agency, has taken 20 years of experience with the processes for running an ad agency and automated them, says Brett Circe, OmniPilot Software's president and the developer of the software.

It allows an agency to better control its work flow as projects move through sales, creative and production departments. Staff members can track projects and their progress as well as gauge the amount of time spent working on each one.

The software also automates many of the functions agency staffers perform, such as producing job estimates, production schedules, time and expense sheets, and invoices.

Because the software is Internet based, staffers can tap into it from any place in the office as well as from home or on the road.

Chuck Southworth, chief operating officer at Yesawich, Pepperdine, Brown & Russell in Orlando, which specializes in travel advertising, is a fan of OmniPilot. He says the agency experience that went into producing the program shows.

For instance, the software runs on both Windows PCs and Apple computers since most creative agencies use Macs for graphics. (It also runs on the Linux operating system.)

But Southworth believes the software will be greatly improved when it adds a component that lets an agency track media buys for print and TV.

OmniPilot has sold about 300 licenses for its Agency software. Some of the users, besides YPB&R, are Soffer Adkins in Fort Lauderdale, Creative Zone in Calgary, Alberta, a full-service marketing agency, KOI in Puerto Rico, which does ad and PR work, and the creative department at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers office in Buffalo, N.Y.

Clients buy the software outright and can purchase upgrades as they are added. The original cost is $489 for 1 to 24 licenses.

The cost drops as more licenses are purchased. Plus, OmniPilot guarantees that upgrades won't cost more than 20 percent of the original price.

The company is developing three other applications that it will use in house and sell outside.

The one that's nearly ready for prime time is OmniPilot Web, a website content-management system. It took 18 months to develop and has been used to run some 50 client websites for the past year and a half.

Again, Circe says, this application is easy to use, allowing agencies to manage their sites or clients to do it themselves. This provides a cost savings since companies can save on management fees. But they still have to pay Web-hosting fees.