Create Business Value in Operations with Digital Asset Management

in the age of Industry 4.0, Customer Experience is the new differentiator. One tool that can help manufacturers create an advantage is Digital Asset Management.

Until recently, if a manufacturer wanted to stay ahead of the competition, it would focus on keeping costs down while optimising its manufacturing processes through automation and computerisation. But in the age of Industry 4.0, Customer Experience is the new differentiator. And one tool that can help manufacturers create digital advantage is Digital Asset Management.

The shift towards placing the customer at the heart of B2C business ecosystems, contains some useful lessons for B2B manufacturing companies. Maintaining the loyalty of trading partners, suppliers, and ultimately the end customer will become crucial in Industry 4.0. McKinsey found that companies that offer an exceptional customer experience can exceed the gross margins of their competitors by more than 26%.

Using DAM as a Tool for Competitive Advantage

Regardless of the business vertical, there are often many customer journeys happening across an organisation at any one time. Ensuring these journeys remain consistent in the eyes of the customer is a challenge. One way of creating better B2B customer journeys that get overlooked by manufacturers is Digital Asset Management (which is an important part of a Customer Experience strategy). 

While marketing departments are familiar with the need for digital assets (images, logos, video, audio, etc.) to be up-to-date and consistent, Operations can be less aware of how better management of digital assets can improve their activities.

Manage the lifecycle of assets in a centralised, secure, and easy way

If an organisation has a centralised “single source of truth” for digital assets, it can use the information from one department and ensure that it can also be reused and adapted for another. For example, a digital asset that is adapted for marketing could also be used by other departments such as operations, finance, logistics, and HR (invoices, order confirmations, barcode labels, quotes, employee materials, etc.).

Many business verticals including manufacturing use PIM systems to aggregate large amounts of product information from various sources, and different Stock Keeping Units (SKUs) in their sales processes.

However, a PIM system might not always be able to handle the 1000s of digital assets such as video and audio files different departments may need access to in the future. This will overstretch a PIM system over time. In these cases, many organisations chose to integrate a centralised DAM that can scale across the whole enterprise and support all systems including PIM such as web shops, e-commerce, Marketing, and other ERP systems.

DAM Case Study – Rexel

Rexel is one of the world’s largest electricity wholesalers. With over 120,000 articles in their webshop alone, their PIM-system was not sufficient for all their needs. They overcame their challenges with OpenText Media Management from OpenText. Read more here.

Successful DAM implementation

Swedwise can help you accelerate the return on investment of DAM. We ensure that you’ll get the most of the performance and functionality of a DAM solution as part of your wider customer experience and information management strategy.