The packaging and artwork development process is under pressure to deliver an increasingly short duration. In a market of reduced consumer spending, extended resource costs, and dramatically increased sustainability interests, brands are looking for alternatives to efficiently manage the complexities of the packaging and artwork management process.
Artwork Flow makes it easy to manage a brand’s packaging artworks and labels across multiple creative applications. It streamlines complex artwork management processes, collaborates better with the team, and ensures the quality of every piece of artwork-all within a single platform.
It is a cloud-based platform that streamlines and automates artwork management processes. It assists teams in managing and delivering their packaging artwork and labels brand management. The solution enables project managers to create custom workflows, assign tasks and checklists along with dashboards that provide insights into the progress status of the project and team productivity.
Artwork Flow transforms the way your teams manage artwork and helps you efficiently design artwork for your brand packaging.
Most common packaging artwork management challenges
1. Lack of clarity between teams
The right collaboration and cooperation are vital in any industry and, when done inefficiently, play a significant role in losses and mistakes. Many aspects of a project, like artwork approval access, product designing, branding, sales, etc., have individual management processes. Such a lack of clarity can surely lead to lots of confusion and conflicts. These miscommunications can also lead to artwork product challenges in planning and product launches.
2. Inefficient workflows
Manual processes focus a lot on manual entries and spreadsheets, which are outdated and inefficient. This can leave a huge impact on the entire workflow itself. Let’s say that a collaborator is responsible for checking the products with regulatory compliance, after which the product artwork moves to the next step. However, there are significant errors made during the manual entry. This, in turn, can cause a wreck to the entire process of the product launch.
3. Manual Proofing
Manual proofing can lead to a lot of back and forth between teams as it is not always feasible to keep track of changes every minute. For example, if there is a change in the product’s design but is skipped or ignored unintentionally due to manual proofing, it halts the entire process. Reworks or shifts in timelines are quite common, and therefore, keeping track of every bit of updates deems crucial.
4. Inaccessible assets
With so many assets and documents, it would be quite a challenge to have control. Furthermore, searching for that single file amidst so many assets can be a frustrating struggle. When such issues become an everyday affair, they take up a significant amount of time and effort. What’s more, is that sharing access to such crucial files with everyone is truly not advisable.
5. Communication gap
Organizations use multiple channels for communication like email, phone, chat, and shared folders. But the use of multiple channels makes it difficult to keep track of important information. For example, maintaining communication through emails can lead to huge threads. This, in turn, can make it quite challenging to retrieve or look up feedback, leading to gaps in communication.
6. Failure to compliance
Heavily regulated industries like pharmaceuticals have their own set of packaging and artwork challenges. Therefore, they need to be careful to implement packaging artwork processes that encompass both local and national regulations to keep away from the risk of fines and other punitive action.
7. Data management struggles
The data needed to make an effective and compliant label has never been greater in quantity and variety than it is today. Clear workflows and central data repositories can tame this data sprawl. Companies without such assets may find themselves in inefficiency and accuracy problems with incorrect versions of files at times being used by accident.
Packaging artwork management is a tricky part of producing items of any kind. This means having effective, modern systems in place to create optimized workflows is essential—this is why we bring you Artwork Flow.
How can Artwork Flow help in packaging artwork management?
1. Customizable workflows
With Artwork Flow, you can create customized workflows, add checklists and set the sequence of tasks across different departments. It helps your collaborators and teams to get an overview of the processes and understand priorities better.
2. Project status tracking
Artwork Flow enables a shared artwork workspace that makes project tracking simple. Since the solution will be used by teams across different verticals and departments, project managers can pinpoint bottlenecks, predict hurdles and create realistic plans to meet deadlines.
3. Digital artwork proofing
Even the slightest variation in color or font can cause a product rollback. Artwork Flow provides online proofing, which can help to proof artwork PDF files instantly in terms of measuring design elements, extracting fonts, and colors used in the artwork. It takes online proofing beyond manual checks and does a better job of reducing the risk of errors.
4. Collaboration between stakeholders
Single projects can involve several teams like marketing, legal, finance, etc. Such teams require a collaborative environment that Artwork Flow provides and makes seamless through comments, annotations, and oversee where the approval is pending.
5. Version tracking, control, and comparison
There will always be a possibility to have multiple versions of artwork files. However, the organization of the files and tracking the revisions are important. Artwork Flow enables version control and tracking that allows access to the revision history of a design file. This eliminates the struggle of searching for the design in a large media library. It brings clarity to design iteration. It also lets managers devise measures to speed up the artwork approval process and roll out the brand packaging faster.
6. Digital asset management
Artwork Flow provides a packaging asset management library that facilitates the organization of artwork files. It offers cloud storage to safely and securely keep packaging artwork files with easy access to files. It immensely reduces required-receive time. The digital asset library helps designers collaborate and receive feedback on artworks in a centralized place.
Optimize your packaging artwork management for ultimate success
Product packaging and artwork management play a critical role in the adoption of sales of your products, and its influence on consumers’ buying decisions and brand recognition cannot be minimized. With Artwork Flow, you can avoid manual, error-prone processes and experience real-time collaboration while focusing your time and resources on core business opportunities.
Artwork Flow enables you to manage packaging and artwork and end-to-end business processes with easy access and transparency. It encourages accountability and builds a structure to your process. It transforms project management, streamlines the packaging concept to the shelf process, enables you to lower costs, improve control and regulatory compliance, and significantly decreases complexity and reduces time to market.
To understand how you can scale your business and packaging artwork management, leave a comment below or book a demo with Artwork Flow today!