The relationship between packaging managers, suppliers, and printers is as important as it is challenging. For example, did you know five percent of all data entry is wrong? This means five out of every one hundred job details are inaccurate, and those same jobs could be recalled, increasing costs, and slowing speed to market. Sounds like a big deal, right? It is. If you’re a brand or packaging manager, here’s how to create synergy in your relationship with suppliers and printers.
The Current Experience
Vendors and printers share the responsibility for manual data entry. These human touchpoints create the possibility for typos and other errors. They also work with multiple customers and job specifications at the same time, so it’s easy for them to get lost among different systems. The brand-vendor-printer relationship is made even more difficult when brands are unaware of the number of jobs the external agencies are handling concurrently. Brands are under considerable time pressure and need to know what their printers and vendors are working on and when jobs are being processed.
Additionally, the wrong job specifications lead to quality issues – both on the press and off, due to the many manual efforts. As a brand owner, how do you know if the printer is printing in accordance with your brand’s standards? Is it printing the right, high-quality color?
If this sounds like your current experience, don’t worry. Let’s explore how data and color management tools help you streamline your packaging processes.
Better Data Management – Connection is the Cure
Connection starts with communication. Connecting your solutions to streamline the process as a whole – packaging, to suppliers, to printers – enables smoother transition between each phase of the packaging continuum. Esko’s Integration platform as a service (iPaaS) is the conduit for Esko resources to help build integrations connecting Esko products and your solutions. It seamlessly connects the content and data from Esko Solutions into 3rd party technologies to drive automation, system utilization, and user productivity.
WebCenter, Esko’s collaborative workflow software, guides your team through the process of creating and approving packaging artwork so you can bring consumer products to market faster. WebCenter shows both brands and suppliers what jobs are in process and provides the project data. If issues arise, brands are notified and can make the necessary modifications before errors occur.
Using iPaaS to connect systems like WebCenter to other software solutions, the process of briefing, completing a job, and sending the packaging artwork or color back for review and approval becomes easier to manage. This fully automated process minimizes the amount of manual data entry, leading to reduced errors, more visibility, and jobs being completed on-time, every time.
Color Management – How to Achieve Right First Time Results
Brand owners work with external or in-house designers to create color and artwork specifications using palettes and libraries in the project brief. The color libraries allow brand managers to organize colors by certain categories, such as by product line, to ensure the correct colors are used. How do you achieve better communication with printers to ensure your color is always accurate, high-quality, and consistent?
Color Trace, a module of WebCenter, is a solution helping brands do just that by structuring the collection of print specifications, communicating them automatically to the supply chain, and returning a scorecard for each job. It connects the color process to the rest of the packaging workflow, so all project information is up-to-date and managed from one location.
Additionally, Color Trace provides an approved digital color specification for each job capable of being loaded into QC software with a single click. The software then measures the color information while checking it against compliance standards. It can also check the color information on the final artwork against the original print specifications.
The information generated by Color Trace is incorporated into the workflow to provide visibility and standardized color processes. Brand equity remains protected, as the information in WebCenter is only shared with key stakeholders.
The Final Product
Connecting your systems connects your processes, data, people, and color standards, both internally and externally. Brand owners and packagers know all too well how critical, and oftentimes difficult, it is to manage these. And when there is a lack of visibility into the process it’s even harder! That’s why integrating software solutions, and using the right ones, such as WebCenter’s Color Trace, are imperative to maximizing success. Creating efficiencies along the entire packaging value chain leads to a truly automated and connected packaging process. The result is a better product that gets to the shelf faster.
