How Cholayil Created Packaging Artwork Faster and More Efficiently with ManageArtworks
The rules for labeling the products are so stringent that companies must seek approval from the Drugs Controller General of India if they make any label modifications after manufacturing. Non-compliance could attract severe consequences for the brand.
Given the specifications and compliance rules, personal care brands must carefully adhere to all labeling guidelines. This can become a challenge if the company manufactures a wide range of products in India and across various geographies that follow different labeling guidelines. Without a unified platform, managing multiple artworks can be tedious.
Our client, Cholayil Pvt Ltd, faced a similar challenge. Let’s understand this in detail.
Challenges:
Cholayil Pvt Ltd is one of India’s fastest-growing FMCG companies and a pioneer in manufacturing Ayurvedic and Personal care products. It is well-known for its flagship brand, Medimix, and has gained a foothold in more than 35 countries worldwide. Since Cholayil manufactures a wide range of personal care products, they were facing the following issues:
Lack of centralized information: Cholayil had over 1,200+ artwork files for its different brands—Medimix, Cuticura, Mysop, and Sadhev. However, it did not have a centralized repository to organize the latest versions of artwork files. The employees had limited accessibility to the latest artwork designs, which led to an overall delay in completing the workflows on time.
Silos between teams: Another reason for delays was due to silos between the different teams designing, approving, and finalizing the artwork and the external agencies and printers. With no centralized information and no visibility on the artwork’s status, the teams struggled to finalize the designs quickly.
Lengthy workflow timelines: Before printing, artwork has to go through multiple stakeholders—initiator, reviewer, approver, final approver, and uploader. The lengthy workflow was so dependent on all stakeholders that a slight delay from any of them would result in Cholayil missing the schedule and deadline to finalize and print the artwork.
Low Right-First-Time rates: The first-time-right (FTR), or as Cholayil calls the Right-First-Time rate, is a vital metric that indicates the efficiency of the employees in getting the artwork right in the first instance. Due to a lack of updated information and communication between the different stakeholders, the number of iterations was significantly high. This meant that every artwork had to go through multiple revisions, leading to wasting time and resources.
Limited visibility into the delays: Since the teams had limited visibility on the workflow’s progress or the status of ongoing projects, they could not identify and mitigate the exact root cause for the delays. This created a roadblock in improving the processes and increasing the teams’ efficiency.
Delays in launching new products: The lengthy workflow timelines, a lack of coordination between the stakeholders, inefficient processes, and a high number of iterations led to delays in finalizing and printing artwork designs, thereby impacting the product launch timelines. Given the scale at which Cholayil operates, these delays started to affect their business.
We helped Cholayil overcome these challenges by implementing the ManageArtworks solution for five brands, 10+ categories, and 22 components.
ManageArtworks Solution:
Here’s how ManageArtworks Helped Cholayil manage their artwork efficiently:
- Faster workflow completion : Cholayil used ManageArtworks to route the artwork to different departments and stakeholders within and outside the company, enabling them to get faster approvals from everyone. There was an 80% improvement in workflow completion between 2022 and 2023. Additionally, ManageArtworks gave the teams complete visibility into where the delays were happening. This helped them find and mitigate potential bottlenecks on time, which helped Cholayil complete the workflows successfully.
- Rapid product launches: Between 2023 and 2024, ManageArtworks helped Cholayil reduce the workflow delays by 80%! It also ensured that all stakeholders adhered to the workflow schedule and reduced the average time to complete the workflows. All these factors helped Cholayil to approve, finalize, and print the label artworks, launch products faster than before, and generate more revenue.
- Improved collaboration: According to Cholayil, ManageArtworks is like a library of artwork for them. It stores all the artworks in a centralized repository and provides detailed explanations and approval status to all the users. This helped the teams monitor the status of artworks, collaborate, and make decisions to complete the workflows and avoid delays quickly.
- Increase in Right-First-Time rate: With all the artworks and their details available in a single platform and better collaboration, the number of iterations reduced. The Right-First-Time rate improved, indicating a remarkable improvement in the quality of artwork development. This also enabled Cholayil to launch the products quickly.
Besides the efficiency in managing artwork, Cholayil was particularly happy with our responsive customer support team, which heard their concerns and offered quick solutions. They were also delighted that the software update took place over the weekend and were informed beforehand. This ensured that there were no disruptions during business hours.
Here’s what Cholayil had to say about their experience working with ManageArtworks software:
“ManageArtworks is an excellent product to work on with. With this tool, our artwork development timelines are coming down and efficiency is getting improved. This tool makes it easy for multiple departments to work together seamlessly. My special appreciation to the support team. They are extremely knowledgeable, listen to all the queries carefully, and come up with solutions quickly. They ensure that the new updates are implemented without disrupting our work.”
Summary:
With over 1200+ artwork in the pipeline, Cholayil faced various challenges, such as delays in workflow completion, lack of adherence to timelines by different stakeholders, and too many iterations due to silos between teams. Cholayil is one of the leading players in the personal care space, so these delays stopped them from launching new products in the markets faster. With ManageArtworks, Cholayil has improved collaboration between teams, brought more transparency to the workflow, reduced iterations, and ensured that the artwork was completed and approved within the stipulated timelines.