5 Ways DAM Enhances Manufacturing Processes Digital Asset Management (DAM) is a key tool and solution to grow your manufacturing business. As a manufacturer, your organization is focused on understanding your customers, your place in the market, and delivering products that meet their needs and exceed their expectations. A significant part of this equation is the digital content you produce and use to bring goods to market. Scaling an organization to meet the needs of its clients requires tools and solutions that bring efficiency to your organization, so you can focus on strategy and delivery. Below are 5 ways DAM can help you reach your customers. Increase Brand Consistency Your brand is your story. You need to be able to tell that story quickly and with consistency. By having a single repository for your logos, typography, templates, boilerplates, product photography, training videos, audio branding, and style guides to bring it all together and activate this content. Supports efficient packaging workflows Consumers are making their choices with more information than ever before. They are also wanting to make side-by-side comparisons. Which of these two cartons of cereal should I buy? Which of these two portable hard drives will look best next to my new laptop? This consistency is defined by GS1 standards. Organizing digital assets that adhere to GS1 standards will help your organization identify, record, and share product content. Examples of GS1 standards include identification keys like GTIN, barcodes like UPC barcodes, ingredients, and product nutrition, product shots with consistent camera angles and views, such as front top backside. Establish standards for product media Your organization is a maker of things, and makers of boxes of things, and pallets of things. A single unit of your product may itself be made up of 5, 10, 50 elements of digital content from your DAM. Organizing the correct set of logos, photos, typefaces, boilerplate, barcodes, other people’s logos (standards organizations, licensing partners, promotional partners), and dieline, will happen much quicker when these items live in your DAM, in a single folder, or collection, tagged with metadata represent the product number, the version, and other details. Streamline Product Information for retail Your DAM is part of a larger ecosystem of content, supporting e-commerce, brick, and mortar, with unique market segments, and partner promotional requirements. Your DAM can aggregate this information from other sources upstream, such as your Customer Relationship Manager (CRM), your Product Information Manager (PIM), or downstream like your Web content Management System (CMS). With GS1 standard images, groomed romance copy from your PIM, normalize for delivery to Global Data Synchronization Network services, your content and your products are ready for market. Mitigate risk with consolidated product data You might be making child car seats, or house paint, or chocolate frosting. The images in the child seat assembly directions are a digital asset. The directions are a digital asset made of digital assets. These instructions and safety information reach the consumer as printed matter or a downloadable PDF from the website, with FDA, OSHA, state-level requirements, and California consumer requirements. Your DAM is not just a place to securely store the digital assets of your business. It is a node in your network adding value to your manufacturing processes; ensuring as you go to market you are telling your best story with your media and content to engage with your consumers, employees, and partners in the best way possible.
