Best Practices in Artwork Management – Part 2

3. Who’s invited? Internal only / Global System?

Are you done creating your workflow? Now we decide who works behind-the-scenes. We want relevant people to access relevant information. Not only does it pushes the cause faster but you don’t end up compromising data if it were to fall into the wrong hands. Which is why you should ask if the system you’re planning to adopt able to assign roles and permissions? What questions are we looking at?

I. Will the platform be accessible to

• Pre-media agencies?
• Design Agencies?
• Creative Agencies?
• Printers?

II. Will this system be restricted to

• Set of Brands?
• Set of Regions?
• Set of Manufacturing Locations?

Answering these questions will smoothen the IT’s role in the planning and roll-out of the system.

4. Organizing Files – Clutter costs you Cash!

What would it take for managers to understand the enormity of ease organizing data brings in to their work? Enough has been written about the importance of organizing. Let’s talk for a minute about how much disorganization costs you. 

An Express Employment Professionals survey of more than 18,000 business leaders showed that 57% of respondents said they lose 6 work hours per week trying to find things and information. The survey also found that disorganized employees who make $50,000 annually cost their companies about $11,000 per year in lost time due to their disorganization.

In general, it’s best to start with a simplistic folder structure and not overcomplicate things by creating a high level of granularity.

When creating a folder structure, consider how this can expand to accommodate various files that you will create in the future. Be consistent with your usage of your folders structure (as well as a file naming convention) for all of your projects.

For example, you need to decide on whether you want to organize the files as per country / region / brand / pack type, etc.

5. Organizing Meta-Data – plumbing that makes the information age possible

What’s a  library without metadata? A room full of books with just a room full of books. Metadata is basically data about your data. Information about your assets. It helps describe the content of your assets.

 

The Metadata would contain details including the Brand Name, Category Name, Country, SKU Name, SKU Code, Artwork Code, Pack Type, Document Type (like Source File, KLD, etc.), File Type (Illustrator, PDF, Word, etc.)

6. Organizing Projects

 

A study by PricewaterhouseCoopers, which reviewed 10,640 projects from 200 companies in 30 countries and across various industries, found that only 2.5% of the companies successfully completed 100% of their projects.

Failures like these are indicative of the deeper problems surrounding complexity, change, customization, and communication glitches – problems fundamentally affecting the artwork management space as well.

If you’re planning to meet those launch dates you need a system that identifies these challenges and adapts to them to bring out effective solutions.

7. Data Entry Forms & Checklists

Here’s how an amazing system should help its users…

• When users are reviewing or initiating an artwork, the system should provide options for entering data in the system.
• The data could be entered by the user or could come from an external system (like ERP / PLM).
• The system should automatically perform the necessary validations (like check whether the same item code is already in use) and alert the user accordingly.
• When users review an artwork, the system should help them by providing a relevant checklist.
• The system should manage the checklists based on Country, Brand, Pack Type, Department, etc.

We’ve left the best for the last in Part 3 of this blog series. 

Are you ready to launch your next best thing on the most efficient artwork workflow system?

Reach out to the experts. Contact us now!