11 Benefits of Digital Asset Management Systems 1.Accessibility DAM systems decrease the time to locate digital assets and enable organizations to fully control access to their high-value media files very quickly. Assets can be found easily with a search engine. 2.Repurposing Most of the time organizations face recreating media material when they cannot locate it. With a DAM system, the time spent on the recreation of media is minimized. The media materials can be repurposed and reused. 3.Security Controlled access to assets is important to provide consistent and reliable branding efforts. Controlling access can even be critical for a new product design department where the images, drawings, and designs of new products should not be accessed by regular users of the system. In addition, watermarking and digital signature techniques can be used to enforce the use of the approved material. 4.Organizational Collaboration DAM systems enable collaboration among departments and outside vendors. The time spent sending big files is eliminated and fewer human resources are used to fulfill material requests. 5.New Revenue Streams DAM systems generate new revenue streams by repurposing existing content, granting access to available content from different platforms and possibly creating web portals or online libraries that can allow sales of usage rights to the company’s digital assets. 6.Brand Consistency Organizations get credit when they send consistent messages either on the web or through the press and gain a competitive advantage. DAM systems enable the maintenance of consistent brand assets such as company logos, content, videos, graphics and brochures. User rights and rules enable the revised versions of all brand-related media that are in use and prevent confusion. With a DAM system, organizations can securely control brand consistency and send the same messages across multiple departments and outside vendors. 7.Web-Based Access DAM systems enable organizations to distribute content via the web whether for internal or external use through global web-based access. The costs of logistical arrangements for data transportation can be decreased with a DAM system. In addition, DAM systems can also transform media content without a need for a specialized application on the users’ machines. This will minimize the IT management issues and fulfillment requests within the company. 8.Asset Licensing DAM systems can provide self-service access for internal and external users to order digital assets, eliminating the administrative efforts needed to distribute content. Users can gain access to already licensed material or request usage rights for materials with a detailed rights structure. All rights-related rules can be enforced by a DAM system. 9.Digital Rights Management By setting user privileges and release dates on the content, organizations can limit asset leakage and control usage rights and restrictions based on the assignment of roles and asset groups, thereby providing effective digital rights management. Advanced DAM systems provide both an asset and user-level privileges and can also support the event and time-based triggers that can dynamically change security settings as project or user parameters change over the life of an asset or collection. 10.Audit History Some DAM systems provide complete audit history that tracks every transaction in the system. In addition, DAM systems can support visible and invisible watermarking or asset encryption technologies. Companies lose significant amounts of money when unapproved assets are used publicly or new products are leaked to the public before release dates. In a DAM system, digital assets can be securely stored and controlled. 11.Content Creation DAM systems provide efficient review and approval cycles for new and updated content, including immediate distribution once an asset receives final approval and dynamic updating to assets as they are changed or retired. Advanced DAM systems also support a host of third-party transformation engines, which automatically create multiple renditions or proxies from a single master.
