Why Artwork Management?

Video: Why Artwork Management?

A lot goes into developing your packaging artwork. You can't just create a package overnight. Learn how Artwork Management can help you streamline your internal and external processes to optimize your time to market and get your product out the door faster.

Time to Market

The cost of getting products to market has never been higher. Poorly organized review and approval processes and inefficient project management often cause significant delays in delivering packaging artwork that is required to go to market. Inefficient processes, poor stakeholder visibility and difficulty ensuring that mission-critical tasks are promptly addressed can make the artwork creation and approval process a source of risk rather than an enabler to improved time to market.

Unreliable Manual Processes

Using labor-intensive and error-prone manual processes, including the use of spreadsheets and routing of physical folders, adds time and risk to your product lifecycle. This is especially true when there are multiple teams involved and individuals are not completing their tasks on time. Spreadsheets and trackers can be overly complex in size and result in too much time sourcing, chasing and trafficking. These spreadsheets are frequently distributed via email and require a Project Manager to update the master regularly to ensure all changes have been captured.

Difficulty Managing Unstructured Data and Versions

When it comes to Artwork Management and managing new product lifecycles, there are many pieces of content involved in producing a final product. This can include images, legal and marketing pack copy, phrases, regulatory information, translations, barcodes, logos and more. Unfortunately, without an efficient workflow process and a central repository for managing important assets, it’s difficult to determine which version is the most current, and it becomes increasingly difficult to manage changes and provide access to final, approved content.

Lack of Effective Collaboration

Packaging artwork needs to be circulated to many key stakeholders for approval throughout the product lifecycle. However, manual solutions which may even involve circulating artwork PDFs via email don’t provide the type of collaborative platform needed for efficiently managing the process. Stakeholders are not able to simultaneously view, compare and annotate on digital media. That approach, along with disconnected software solutions, results in operational silos and doesn’t encourage accountability.

Insufficient Control and Compliance

Managing control of content used in packaging artwork is critical to meeting deadlines, ensuring compliance and enforcing brand consistency. Unfortunately, without an efficient, standardized process that enables users to leverage a source of truth and ensure consistent content and data, there is lack of control and the omnipresent risk of error.

Excessive Artwork Revisions

Reworks can be time consuming, costly and frustrating and ultimately cause delays in the artwork review and approval process. When jobs start without all of the relevant information, delays and errors almost always ensue. Additionally, reactive and poor communication cause unnecessary revision cycles which both consume scarce resources and delay the readiness of packaging artwork.

Poor Visibility and Metrics

Tracking a complex artwork process can be difficult. However, it’s important to find the time necessary for collecting data because it has a direct effect on resource and capacity planning. Being able to track, report and measure performance can be challenging. However, it is critical to enable visibility throughout your entire end-to-end product lifecycle and to identify any bottlenecks, issues and process inefficiencies.

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Difficulty Integrating with Partners

Without a standardized workflow process to manage packaging artwork, it can be exceedingly difficult to scale processes and locate consistent and approved content for new products. When relying on disjointed processes or working with a printer’s Digital Front Ends (DFE) instead of your own configured workflow process, you lose ownership and control over your content. Each time you switch printers, this approach requires you to re-establish your process and deliver all relevant pieces of content.