How do you reduce costs, enhance efficiency, and increase speed-to-market?
When it comes to saving your company a lot of money and time while making your entire marketing supply chain more efficient, there’s nothing more helpful than packaging and artwork management software.
Let’s explore seven benefits of artwork management software.
Enhanced Proofing
Teams that email files to each approver/reviewer in a set order to garner approvals are using a linear process. There is a better way, and it’s a concurrent process.
When your team can view the file for approval at the same time, in the same web-based platform, your approval process becomes concurrent, and the opportunities abound.
Enhanced efficiencies allow you to lower your opportunity cost and increase your potential revenue.
Project Management
Companies using a manual artwork approval process instead of a digital workflow have a lot of room for improvement.
Let’s define manual.
When a project manager (PM) has to collate feedback from emails and spreadsheets, the process is manual.
Assembling a distribution list in an email, uploading a large file to Dropbox or SharePoint, emailing the link to all parties, reminding them to complete their approval tasks in the right order, etc., are all examples of manual tasks companies use to obtain approvals.
When a PM finally secures all the feedback, deciphering each piece in the form of scrawls on post-it notes, or even consolidating individual comments into coherent direction from disparate PDF files, the process is manual.
Fortunately, these are all pains that artwork management software from Esko can ease.
In fact, our customers report a 40% savings in time after implementing Esko software because of its usability, auto-project tracking, auto-remind, and auto-consolidation of comments and dashboard view.
Audit Tracking
Sooner or later, your organization may need to demonstrate how artwork was approved for release.
If approvals or design changes were done over email, phone, or by handwritten notes, you’re going to have a monster of a task on your hands.
Esko automatically tracks every decision made by every person in your approval or change process. There is no need for project managers to manually keep a record of this information, the audit trail is readily available to you electronically.
Searching
There is nothing more frustrating than knowing you have something you need but not being able to find it.
Every minute spent searching for an asset is money out of your payroll. When your company has a lot of people and assets, the time and money lost quickly starts to add up.
Digital asset management software (DAM) affords you full search capability, minimizing the time you spend spinning your wheels.
Asset Distribution
Getting assets to the right people is complicated.
Most organizations have limits set to control the size of the files that can be sent via email. This requires services like Dropbox, or in some instances, a courier.
Furthermore, if file conversion is required, an owner’s task becomes even more time consuming and repetitive.
Using packaging and artwork management software with automatic file conversion eliminates these problems quickly.
Comprehensive Approval
An asset with approvals that are documented and attached as metadata is worth so much more than a file with uncertain approval status. An asset’s approval status, approver, and approval date are critical information that should be attached to the file.
However, many companies rely on just one person to know all the information.
If a brand needs to be more agile, this information should be readily accessible for everyone, as appropriate.
Artwork Re-Creation
Companies that don’t have packaging and artwork management software may lack a centralized database for assets and tend to have them strewn across various locations.
One asset may be stored on an employee’s hard drive, while others may be stored on various servers, usually arranged by department.
This creates silos of information that are not accessible to everyone company-wide, which leads to redundancy and imprisons assets from reuse.
Over time, assets can be lost, forgotten about, or even erased by error. These are files the company has invested hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars creating and working through an approval process.
They should be treated with care, boxed in their own fresh metadata, and organized them with diligence.
Your Next Step
Artwork management software provides the detail and efficiency companies need to manage artwork and its associated data in today’s fast-paced world.
If your current processes could benefit from this, but you aren’t sure how to build a business plan for its acquisition, check out the latest e-book from Esko, Artwork Management Software Value Estimator – A by the Numbers Review, to learn more.
