De Beers Group

De Beers Group is acknowledged as the world’s leading diamond company, employing 20,000 individuals. Visual merchandising stands as a fundamental expertise for presenting luxury items visually, ensuring the ultimate shopping experience for diamond jewelry. The team oversees retail openings, creative development, and the global rollout of all consumable-oriented materials, including new packaging. The challenge addressed with the assistance of Bluehive was to optimize the work processes of the Visual Merchandising team. The primary objective was to identify lead times and transparently communicate them to other teams, aiming to make time bottlenecks visible and effectively manage complex projects.

The Challenge 

Managing more than 50 projects simultaneously across a global marketing department created serious coordination challenges for the Visual Merchandising team, leading to several key pain points and the need for a more structured approach:

Lack of Lead Time Visibility: Without a central overview of project timelines, it was difficult to identify bottlenecks in advance and communicate delays to other teams in time.

Scattered Communication Channels: Information was spread across emails, team messages and Excel spreadsheets, making it hard to keep everyone aligned and ensuring details fell through the cracks.

Missed Deadlines and Project Delays: The lack of coordination with other marketing department teams resulted in recurring deadline misses and project slowdowns.

Excessive Time on Status Updates: A disproportionate amount of time was spent in interdepartmental meetings just to communicate project progress, time that could be spent on execution.

The Solution

To tackle these challenges, the Visual Merchandising team at De Beers began evaluating work management tools and ultimately selected Asana as the platform best suited to support their complex, global operations.

To ensure a smooth and effective rollout, De Beers partnered with Bluehive as their Asana implementation partner. The goal: map existing workflows, surface operational bottlenecks, and implement a tailored Asana environment that gave the team full visibility and control. To achieve this, the following steps were taken:

In-Depth Analysis Phase: More than 25 members of the marketing team were involved in a thorough discovery process, using stakeholder interviews and workflow mapping to fully understand how the team worked and where the friction lay.

Portfolio-Based Project Management: Asana Portfolios were introduced to give management and team leads a real-time overview of all 50+ active projects, replacing scattered spreadsheets with a single source of truth.

Workload Management: The Workload view was implemented to help team members assess and balance capacity, reducing overload and improving planning accuracy.

Comprehensive Training and Support: A structured onboarding programme ensured all team members felt confident in the new way of working, with continuous support throughout the transition.

Why Bluehive?

De Beers needed more than just a software rollout, they needed a partner who could truly understand the complexity of their operations and translate that into a working Asana setup. Bluehive brought the deep Asana expertise and hands-on implementation approach needed to make it stick.

Through a structured analysis phase, tailored configuration and comprehensive training, the team gained both the technical knowledge and the operational confidence to embed structured ways of working into their daily routine.

The Results

Since implementing Asana, De Beers Group has experienced significant improvements in it's daily operations:

Reduced Time on Status Updates: With project progress visible in Asana, time-consuming status meetings were cut down significantly, freeing up capacity for actual work.

Optimised Planning and Market Briefings: Timelines, milestones and workload views enabled the team to plan more accurately and brief other departments with confidence.

Easier Cross-Departmental Communication: By centralising all communication and project information in Asana, alignment between teams became faster and more reliable.

Conclusion

De Beers’ partnership with Bluehive shows that even the most complex, globally distributed teams can operate with clarity and precision, when the right structure is in place. By implementing Asana in a way that truly reflected how the Visual Merchandising team works, they gained the visibility, coordination and confidence to manage growing complexity without growing the team.