Getting out of the document cul-de-sac

Product manufacturers know that recalls of the type forced on a number of major retailers across the EU earlier this year are expensive and damaging to both brand and reputation. Labelling requirements change with great frequency, varying considerably from one market to the next. In fact, the combined risk of recall and the need to always be ready for labelling changes means you need to be very well prepared for both. But to be as cost-effective as possible, that preparedness must be based on discarding the inefficient current 'document-oriented' way of managing your product and brand information and adopting a 'data' one.

Select the right tool
For too many product manufacturers, data and content - including the components used to produce packaging and labelling artwork - is still held in products such as Excel or Word.

Think about it. Your important assets - text, logos and images used on tags, containers and labels - should be in a safe, easily accessible place for when you start updating or creating a new piece of artwork. Excel was never designed for that; it's not a 'repository' at all.

Spreadsheets work purely by manual entry, re-entry and manipulation of data. If every calculation subsequently made using a
spreadsheet is based on data that has been transposed incorrectly, then the company's exposure is increasing each time the content
is re-used.

It's the same for your artwork assets.

By the same token, however popular, Word is also inappropriate for managing this business process, for a manufacturer or retailer
trying to manipulate product content. For example, a global cosmetics brand my organisation has worked with had 52 manual hand-offs to cope with when it amended or refreshed its packaging and labels, as designs were created and approved between its internal teams and external studio.

In recent times some companies have turned to enterprise solutions such as ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and PLM
(Product Lifecycle Management) but none of these were designed to manage labelling content. Keeping track of all this is critical for a
company or design studio to cope with, but even in 2013, simple spreadsheets and inappropriate Word documents are still the default option for most companies to help manage this process.

False economy
It's no great mystery as to why: they're inexpensive. However, this is a classic case of false economy. For instance, you have 30
different labels (10 countries, three different iterations) to worry about and change. In a document-centric world, that's 30 separate
items to manage. What happens when those 30 documents, even if almost all identical, are handed over to an in-house department or a third party to build artwork?

First, artwork gets created at least two or three times. So, for each of the 30 artworks, there are now 30 additional documents
detailing what to change. But the thing is, the problem on label number one is also wrong on the other 29 labels; and if they get changed twice (or 'only' twice) 30 documents becomes 90 documents. Add to that the files on the designers' Macs, and you've got another 90 Mac files on top of the 90 files in circulation, that can all potentially go out of sync.

Managing complexity
A much better use of time and resource then is to invest a modest amount in fit-for-purpose data and content repositories to store and manage assets. What would this approach look like? In our example, we imagined a company with one product in three sizes/versions, which makes 30 documents.

What if there is just one image that appears on all 30? In this model, if somebody says "Can you just make sure, everywhere, we've said this?", you can change it, and track where to do it, safely, measily and speedily.

Welcome to the data-centric approach to content - where you can track and manage as much complexity as you like - for as many
thousands of products, sizes and versions as you wish. For example, in the case of the large cosmetics manufacturer previously cited, the company reduced the number of approvals processes in its artwork creation from 52 steps to precisely two.

So get out of the 'document blind spot', and head for a better place, where computers do the work, protecting you from wasted time,
error and needless cost - protecting you from the severe penalties and issues associated with non-compliant product content.

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