Digital asset management

Today’s enterprises are accumulating more data and digital assets – video, images, product descriptions, 3D renditions, to name just a few – than they can effectively manage. At the same time, there’s been an exponential growth in every business’s need to leverage those assets to support many different digital channels, formats, dimensions, and resolutions across departments.

In most organisations, marketing departments were first to realise the need to manage digital assets, because they were essential to advertising campaigns and other marketing content. They turned to digital asset management (DAM) solutions to ensure that all available assets were used to their fullest extent.

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Today, the best DAMs enable their most sophisticated users to create customer intimacy and loyalty with efficient campaigns that require fine-grained segmentation and personalisation of increasingly niche audiences around the globe. DAM solutions also enable these departments to manage the full digital content creation and publication supply chain, from ingesting and automated tagging of content, to its creative review, approval, and omni-channel distribution.

But while DAM first found favor with marketing, other parts of the business that support great customer experience have also seen benefits from the technology. Here are three examples, from sales, to production, and even finance.

Responsive sales

Selling products and services around the world at scale can quickly become an unwieldy process. To effectively manage these tasks, sales departments are increasingly relying on DAM technology.

For example, PTS America, one of the largest suppliers of decorated tableware in the world, faced major issues due to its reliance on email and spreadsheets to conduct business between designers, clients, and the factory. The company manually handled sales and tracking processes between its different departments and global locations – a time consuming and chaotic process that left a lot of room for error.

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As a result, PTS America ran the risk of missing product delivery deadlines and inevitably lowering its customer satisfaction rates. By adopting DAM, the company was able to automate workflows to simplify sales and tracking processes and ensure better customer satisfaction.

Consistent production

Production departments are also taking advantage of DAM technology to manage the digital contents in manufacturing and distributing processes at scale.

For example, PTS America produces and distributes its products to large-scale retailers in North America, Canada, and parts of South America. They manage all their designs in-house, and over time, amassed a collection of tens of thousands of designs and graphic files, including many based on textile or wallpaper designs. With existing processes in place, it was nearly impossible for production teams to access relevant files for design teams to leverage. Other production processes were also encumbered.

A dinner plate, for example, can have a variety of basic shapes and may come in five or six different forms from the factory. To decorate it, a graphic is printed on a decal film, which is then fused to the plate in a high temperature firing. Furthermore, to accompany the items, PTS America often purchases graph cards from the artists who created the designs, which are scanned and digitised so they can be customised to shapes or designs that fit the tableware.

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Finding the right design, and the designer, in this huge archive paralysed production teams and resulted in an unmanageable design process. To address this, PTS America turned to DAM, which enables its teams to store, organise, and access designs from a unified repository; minimises the effort to look for or recreate assets; and enables teams to streamline complex design processes.

Enriching financial transactions with product content

DAM technology enables finance to automatically enrich receipts or invoices with imagery, and to manage related order workflows and approvals. This helps ensure that the company and its vendors are on the same page, and minimises content duplication and syncing issues that manual entry introduces.

Imagine the scale and complexity of managing this manually in a company that relies on licensed artwork. At one licensed apparel company, the volume of designs was compounded by a variety of fabrics and apparel designs, as well as keeping track of the rights associated the graphics.

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The agility, scale, and sophistication of digital asset management required by today’s business environment leaves many organisations in a bind. Increasing DAM technology adoption by departments beyond marketing better equips businesses to streamline workflows and collaborate across departments – saving them time and money to focus on building better products and services.

Sourced by Uri Kogan, vice president of Product Marketing at Nuxeo