3 Ways DAM Streamlines CPG Delivery

In our previous articles covering Digital Asset Management (DAM) for manufacturing and retail, we outlined a total of 10 ways DAM can help you go to market and succeed. With this foundation, we want to shift our focus to specific business sectors where DAM can optimize its supply chain. First, up is Consumer Packaged Goods better known as ‘what you had for breakfast today.’

What are Consumer Packaged Goods?

Consumer Packaged Goods Companies are products that are sold quickly, with high inventory turnover, and relatively low cost. These are the prepared meals, breakfast cereals, beverages, sweets, sauces, household cleaners, over-the-counter drugs, and other consumables that fill our fridges, pantries, and medicine cabinets.

Many retailers carry only consumer packaged goods.

Think supermarkets, big box stores, warehouse clubs, and the corner market between your bus stop and home. If you visit all four of these retail formats, you may end up with many different versions of your favorite breakfast cereal as there are stores you shopped at today.

Multiply by millions, it is a wonder how anyone can keep it all straight. This web of packaging, product data, and logistics is where DAM can streamline operations before your cereal gets soggy. Let’s start with these three pieces of low-hanging fruit.

GS1 Metadata

GS1 is a not-for-profit organization best known for establishing barcode. Barcodes are defined by another GS1 standard: the GTIN–short for Global Trade Item Numbers. GTINs are globally unique and can be shared across organizations. They enable supply chain visibility from producer to retailer, local to global.

A barcode can be a digital asset. A GTIN number can be metadata. Used together, they will help define an asset record in your Digital Asset Management. But what is missing here? The product media AKA the digital asset. GS1 has a solution for that too.

GS1 Product Media

More than likely, you saw many of the items in your grocery cart before you went shopping today. The store website or app, the adverts on your favorite social network, those targeted coupons in the mail, the gas pump across the parking lot, almost everywhere you look it seems. If you didn’t see exactly what you put into your cart, you saw a similar product from another brand down to the same camera angles in the photographs.

This consistent presentation of product fronts and sides, nutrition panels, ingredients, back, and bottoms, is what makes the GS1 product image so powerful. The consumer is able to easily visually compare products to make informed decisions. These image standards also have corresponding naming conventions so your DAM can read that character string and know camera angles, faces, and types of product package information.

Digital Content Syndication

Delivering the digital assets for one box of breakfast O’s to one retailer is easy: zip, email, done. But what about dozens of GTINs to thousands of retailers? Email attachments won’t scale in anyone’s workflow. This is where syndication solutions come in.

It starts with a Global Data Synchronization Network (GDSN).  Digital content (assets and metadata) representing millions of products reside in large data pools managed by syndication service providers. A GDSN makes it possible for any company, in any market, to share high-quality product information to their retail partners or directly to consumers via online e-commerce platforms.

If you are a CPG producer, you may have a downstream integration with your DAM that organizes product media and metadata into data structures suitable for each of your retail partners. As a CPG retailer, your GDSN partner serves as a gateway where your team can review, select, and ingest product media and metadata into your content supply chain, including your DAM.

When it all comes down to ‘Which cereal should I buy?’ CPG producers and retailers organize their DAM workflows to leverage GS1 standards. Then consumers are empowered to make apples-to-apples comparisons of the products they are purchasing. Contact CyanGate to learn more about how we can help your organization use DAM to manage your CPG digital content.