MM: A couple of last questions. To what degree have your creative teams integrated their desktop tools—Creative Suite or Photoshop or whatever—to the DAM directly? Or are they working through a browser?

BG: They’re working through the browser.

AS: Is this an integration you’d like to see BJ? Or is the browser enough?

BG: I would have to understand better what the benefits are to having the tools connect to the DAM. If it changes the way the creative team builds their files and disrupts their routine with no benefits then I would think working as we do today is fine.

AS: You might see, though, that the metadata in the Creative Suite is the same metadata framework as in your DAM system. So you do have an entrée at the asset level.

BG: Right, but I wonder what the benefits are. I see having that technology available is new and interesting. But what is the pay off or win?

MM: Another question I have with respect to your system. You really talk about an image library and an image workflow where photograph is king. Clearly, in a marketing operation, there are things like documents—be they catalog pages or sales sheets or direct mail pieces, video, etc.

MM: How have you integrated, if at all, the document publishing workflow into this Global Edit workflow that you have today?

BG: I have a two-part answer to that. The first part of the answer is how we are doing it right now, and the second part is where I’d like the system to evolve and the challenges with that vision.

First, we currently store final marketing documents in the DAM project folder, JPEGs of the final in-store signs, advertisements, CRM, PR.  I definitely wanted to capture all the marketing materials that we created with these images and post them to the DAM system so everyone could reference what was done from our end with those images—a comprehensive library of the project.

Second, we do more of the publishing workflow and project tracking in a software application called Adtrax. The creative job jackets are here where the copy team writes in the system, schedules are kept, email notifications are sent with updates, and we keep legal boilerplates here. The system works really well.

The challenge for Industrial Color to come up with a way that GLOBALedit and Adtrax share information or link. I would like it to be either by job number or some sort of code that makes them link. So if you’re in a job folder in Adtrax you will be able to connect to GLOBALedit and see the images that are being used for that project.

There is not only appetite to have the two be able to link, but even further than that is “Can Industrial Color build out a project-management tracking system to work with the image asset workflow system?” It would be interesting to be in one big system that is web-based. I have to give it more thought to see if it makes sense because if it’s not their expertise then I don’t want to go down that path. We won’t get the best product.

MM: Great result! So take us through what the merchandiser did with page-profit analysis.

TM: One of the things that we saw immediately that was advantageous when you think about the fact that all it is – is data. You used to look at a Quark or InDesign page—and say, “Okay. That’s a design page. Type in the information. Import a picture.”

Once the mindset or paradigm shift happened, people started looking at that as data. Then you started saying, “You know what? There’s other data we might want to be able to look at on this page, after we’ve already sent the page to the printer.”

If you can populate data on a page in a price table, does there have to be a price? No.

It could be the amount of sales for that particular SKU or that particular product grouping. Or it could be the number of units that were sold that year. All you have to do is change the data field that it’s pulling to the page.

MM: In the current state, Tom, you had merchandisers that would own a particular category or categories of product. With a felt-tip pen, they overwrote on a print catalog page the quarter or the beginning inventory position, end inventory position, items sold, gross revenues.

TM: Sales and gross profits. And they would actually be looking at a green bar, writing information into a catalog—sometimes using the spreadsheet on their screen to compile data if they needed to compile it. Because the green bar wouldn’t do that.

Each of the product managers would be doing this. So there were five product managers that would spend two to four weeks every cycle populating their pages in their catalog.

All of the product managers wanted to have all of the information, so they’d switch books and they’d mark up somebody else’s book—until all five product managers had all five master books marked up with that information—hand-written.

MM: So the idea then in the future-state is, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we took a PDF or the InDesign document that had the 900-page document and simply did an automated overlay?” A data overlay from the database of beginning inventory position—end inventory position—gross revenues—profits—returns. Simply just published directly—almost as a transparency or an overlay to the actual thing on the page.

TM: Absolutely. That’s exactly what we did. We could do that in the course of a weekend.

MM: With that kind data without the effort, merchandisers could begin to understand patterns and correlate particular presentations or configurations of products that produce a “lift,” in terms of increased sales. Thus, they could begin to understand, “If I put that product here, I get a 3% bump. If I put that same product over here, then I take a 5% hit.”

TM: Yes. There are additional modules that you can get that even do more forecasting than those types of simple analyses, too.

MM: Such as?

TM: It’ll say, “If you put it in the upper right-hand quarter or the lower left-hand corner.” Or, “Is it on the first page of the section or is it on the cover, too?” “Is it on the back cover? Is it on the inside front cover?” “Are you presenting it on the web differently? Are you even presenting it on the web?” There are lots of different ways to look at that type of data.

MM: So then as you develop the future-state capability, you started to really define work-cells that enable you and your automation team to really optimize the productivity of individual workers. Did I get that right?

TM: Yes.