Long, complex and challenging. 

These are a few words that describe artwork management processes. 

A product’s life cycle involves many processes before it's released into the market. Sometimes, the necessity of artwork management gets neglected. An inefficient artwork management process has the potential to delay a product's launch. 

As a Brand Manager, you might face many challenges in the artwork approval process. As the point of contact in the artwork approval process, you are responsible for many tasks. 

In a brand’s setup, product launches are major events. 

Other teams and contributors speak and depend on you to share knowledge, give status updates and plan out the next steps.

However, there are many obstacles. You need to manually manage the approval process. Often, there is a lack of collaboration between teams. Many brands also have insufficient integration of technology creating operational difficulties. 

Here are 5 common emails you might have received during artwork management. Read ahead to know how Artwork Flow, a Creative Automation Platform, can help tackle those.    

1. Please Send The Image Used In Artwork X 

Consider you get the above message from a marketer. He or she needs to use an image from a particular artwork in another collateral. You start going through email chains, folders or online drives in search of that image. 

Maybe you find it quickly this time. But the next time, when the volume of data/images/files increases, a similar request will take longer.   

As the number of packaging artwork projects increase, so do the assets. It becomes more and more complicated to find a particular asset in emails or folders. The sheer size of files makes sharing files on emails difficult, creating the need for an external file-sharing system. 

When your team uses a cloud-based artwork management system, the artwork approval process becomes organized. Any time a contributor needs access, you can give them the authorization. This helps to protect your packaging data assets in a centralized library.

2. We Need Artwork Y Adapted For This SKU

As a Brand Manager, you might often receive this kind of email from senior team members. 

In a traditional approval process, you talk to every team and contributor to give them a heads-up. You create separate email threads or messaging groups to keep everyone in the loop.

You create spreadsheets and give reminders to every contributor about their upcoming tasks. It creates a chaotic working environment and makes the approval process vague.    

As a Brand Manager with an artwork management tool at hand, you can easily coordinate projects with contributors across teams. You can customize timelines or choose from a template to suit your project schedule. 

You can select contributors, assign them tasks through checklists and set deadlines for each of them. 

3. Is The Barcode Number On Artwork Z Correct?

Fact-checking is an essential part of artwork management. That’s why the above question is usually asked during an artwork approval process. 

Information on packaging depends on many industry regulations. For example, in the beverage industry, regulations vary according to geographic areas. Every state or region has certain rules regarding the information on product packaging. 

In artwork management, the legal team reviews all the information. They confirm whether it complies with regulations. As the artwork progresses through the approval stage, a contributor might want to confirm details on the packaging. 

If there is an error, then there are many possibilities the product might fail. The product can get rejected during quality checks or even recalled from the market. Due to the critical status, it's your responsibility to keep track of all comments and feedback. 

Teams keep following feedback in meetings, emails, messages or calls. This makes it difficult to keep track. That's why teams should work on a single online artwork management platform. As the brand manager, you can pull up a comment or feedback to understand why there was a revision in an artwork.  

4. Why Is Artwork X Stuck In Approval?

This question frustrates many Brand Managers. If you are one of them, then you are frequently chasing contributors to get an artwork file approved. You have to meet deadlines, do multiple calls with production teams and stay under the budget.   

Delays in artwork management are due to many operational obstacles. The most common reasons are errors and improperly coordinated tasks. 

You have to constantly follow up for approvals. If you forget to remind even a single contributor in the task-chain then you fall behind on the schedule.

If you are often in this situation, then you need to bridge the gap between teams. You can do it with an intuitive artwork management platform. At a glance, you’ll know the status of an artwork project and keep other teams in the know. 

A visual representation will offer valuable insights and also help you to anticipate any hurdles.

5. Is Artwork Y Ready For Production?

You repeatedly get this kind of email or message when the deadline begins to near. Artwork Management becomes critical when the artwork is in the final stages. Once it goes ahead for production, there’s no going back.

Consider, a product getting recalled due to errors on the packaging artwork. The artwork will be completely revised and go through another approval process. 

It‘ll cause the brand to incur huge losses finances. The iterations will also increase the product’s time to market. A brand’s reputation might suffer in the market. Customers will opt for other similar products resulting in an opportunity cost. 

Online artwork proofing tools speed up the approval process without compromising on quality and accuracy. The final packaging artwork should echo the brand’s style and identity. A brand's colors, fonts and graphics create customer recall.

The packaging artwork also needs to match any and all industry regulations. For example, the size of the net weight symbol or recycle icons which are mandatory.

Takeaway

Artwork management is steadily moving away from traditional practices to become swift, simple and intuitive. With centralized information and technology-enabled process, Brand Managers can efficiently manage artwork.   

If you are looking for a complete packaging artwork management software, then Artwork Flow is what you need. Artworks flow is an effective brand asset management software.

It's safe. It’s cloud-based. And It’ll help you manage artwork seamlessly.