1,000 users. 600 versions a week. 42,000 proofs a month. One platform.

Why it matters

Most marketing project management software is built for small-to-medium team sizes. They work fine when 5 or 10 reviewers are working on a project. They start to strain at 50. They typically fall apart at 200, either through performance degradation, permission complexity that becomes unmanageable, or tooling that was never designed for multi-team coordination at scale.

Enterprise marketing operations do not run at 5 or 10 reviewers. They run with hundreds of internal stakeholders, hundreds more agency partners, and review pipelines that touch thousands of assets per month. Pharma compliance review pulls in legal, regulatory, medical, brand, and operations teams across geographies. Retail promotional execution involves merchandising, marketing, brand, legal, and store-level operations across many banners. Direct mail at scale involves production, compliance, marketing, and quality teams reviewing batches that themselves contain thousands of personalized variants.

When you operate at this scale, "concurrent reviewers" stops being a feature comparison checkbox and starts being a make-or-break operational requirement. Aproove was built for it.

The Kroger anchor

The most documented public example is the Kroger Promotional Execution Centre of Excellence, where Aproove powers marketing content operations across 22 distinct retail brands.

As cited in the Kroger Promotional Execution Centre of Excellence Transformation white paper (Aproove, October 2021):

• 1,000+ active Kroger users as of June 2021, on track to 2,000+ users by December 2021, across Merchandising, Advertising, and Display planning communities.
• 600+ content versions produced and reviewed each week across the 22 brands, each operating as a distinct business with its own promotional differentiation.
• 42,000+ proofs and associated notes orchestrated per month.
• Over one hundred million sets of permissions managing who can see what across hundreds of thousands of tasks.
• 637,171 proofs processed, 490,769 tasks sent, and 392,665 notes created in May 2021 alone.

The case study describes the platform as "technically handling over One Hundred Million sets of permissions across hundreds of thousands of tasks to enable this high volume of content traffic."

This is concurrent review at scale, in production, in a public reference deployment.

How Aproove supports this scale

Three architectural choices in our marketing operations software make this kind of operational scale work.

Dedicated hosted infrastructure for enterprise customers. Aproove's enterprise deployments do not share infrastructure with other tenants in a multi-tenant pool. Each enterprise customer can be provisioned on a dedicated cluster, with capacity sized to their actual usage patterns. As the Kroger white paper notes: "The clustered infrastructure design for Kroger allows for substantial user growth that could not be achieved in a typical multi-tenant SaaS environment." Performance scales with capacity, not against shared resource limits.

Streaming, not distribution. Because files are streamed rather than downloaded, the platform's concurrency capacity is bounded by what the streaming layer can serve, not by the merge-conflict problem that limits download-based platforms. Hundreds of reviewers can open the same proof at the same moment, see each other's annotations in real time, and continue working without the platform forcing them into a queue.

Identity integration and auto-provisioning at enterprise scale. Aproove supports SAML 2.0 single sign-on with auto-provisioning into customer identity providers, enabling user populations of thousands to be managed through your existing identity infrastructure. As described in the Kroger case study, this allows the platform to "auto-provision the onboarding and activation of 1,000+ users across the diverse Kroger business estate" and to handle ongoing changes (departures, role moves, new joiners) without manual administration. Adding 500 new users to a deployment becomes a configuration change, not a manual process.

What concurrent review actually looks like

Inside a high-scale Aproove deployment, several patterns emerge.

Multi-team parallel review on the same asset. Legal, brand, regulatory, marketing operations, and external agency reviewers can be working on the same proof simultaneously. Component-level permissions ensure each reviewer sees the parts of the file relevant to their role. Real-time annotation push means everyone sees each other's work as it happens.

Multi-brand, multi-business-unit operations on shared infrastructure. Kroger's 22 brands operate as distinct businesses inside a single Aproove deployment. Each brand has its own workflows, its own review teams, its own templates, its own asset catalogs. Permissions and configuration isolate each brand while the platform itself runs as one.

Volume operations sustained at scale. Hundreds of thousands of tasks per month is not a theoretical limit; it is documented operational reality. Proofs Processed, Tasks Sent, and Notes Created scale together as the user base scales, with Aproove activity tracked alongside user growth as a normal operations metric.

Multi-stakeholder decisions handled cleanly. Step Groups, unanimous and majority voting, Conflict Manager escalation, primary and secondary task patterns: the workflow primitives that handle multi-assignee decisions at small scale work the same way at large scale. A decision step with 12 assignees follows the same configuration model as a decision step with 2.

Benefits

• Concurrency is not a feature ceiling. Hundreds or thousands of simultaneous users is supported by the architecture, not bolted on after the fact.
• Performance scales with deployment capacity. Dedicated enterprise infrastructure means scale is a procurement decision, not an architectural compromise.
• Multi-team coordination without external tools. Real-time annotation, project chat, task chat, and decision-based workflows handle coordination that would otherwise spill into email, chat apps, and meetings.
• User population management at enterprise scale. SAML 2.0 SSO and auto-provisioning through customer identity providers handle hundreds or thousands of users without per-user manual administration.
• Multi-brand, multi-business-unit isolation in a single deployment. One Aproove instance can serve dozens of distinct businesses with their own workflows, permissions, and templates.
• Proof throughput at hundreds of thousands per month. Documented in production deployments, not estimated.‍
• The audit trail keeps up. Every annotation, decision, and task across hundreds of thousands of monthly events lands in the same audit framework that serves smaller deployments.

Under the hood

Concurrent Review at Scale is supported by Aproove's enterprise deployment model: dedicated hosted clusters provisioned per enterprise customer with capacity sized to expected usage, deployable on Aproove-hosted Microsoft Azure infrastructure (default), customer-self-hosted cloud, or on-premise. The clustered architecture separates Aproove Backend Processing nodes (file ingestion, RIP, tiling), Aproove Frontend User nodes (Review Interface, API, dashboards), Project Storage, and Database, with regionally redundant snapshot/backup and remote-region disaster recovery configurations. Streaming and real-time collaboration channels are designed for high concurrent connection counts. Identity integration supports SAML 2.0 single sign-on with auto-provisioning into customer identity providers, enabling user lifecycle management at thousands of users without manual administration. Permission storage scales to handle organizational complexity at the level of one hundred million plus permission relationships, as documented in the Kroger Promotional Execution Centre of Excellence Transformation case study (Aproove, October 2021). Audit trail and Generation Jobs storage scale with the underlying data layer.