Digital Asset Management - DAM-it! - The Blog » Return on Investment (ROI)

Top 5 Ways Digital Asset Management Saves Money

Melissa Kelly — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 17:58:50 +0000

If you’ve ever wondered why digital asset management (DAM) is gaining a lot of momentum in organizations across all verticals, well, you’re not alone. The topic is surely one of the most pondered queries in the world, next to world peace, ending hunger, and Dancing With The Stars.

Ok, so maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration. Still, DAM is an important topic to businesses here and abroad, and there’s a good reason for that: DAM systems free up time from doing daunting tasks and allow for an organized structure, freeing users to be more efficient and creative. As competition increases within industry, organizational efficiency is becoming more and more critical.

Can a DAM system really give you the best bang for your buck? Read on to discover why you’re actually wasting precious time and money without a DAM.

Save Time

In business, time is money. That age-old wisdom is applicable as much to the folks running a general store in the Old West as it is today. With digital assets organized in a centralized repository, searchable with metadata, locating your desired asset is as simple as typing a keyword and clicking search. Once you easily find that digital asset, you can focus more of your time on that all-important creativity.

Avoid Hardware Costs

DAMs are fantastic systems, and they’re even better when you don’t have to worry about server space, hardware, or updates that create a hassle and drain your pocketbook. When your digital asset management software is in the cloud, you get all of that and more. A reputable cloud DAM provider will handle all of the behind the scenes details – including security – while allowing for easy scalability with almost no maintenance. In the cloud, your DAM is maintained for you, so all you have to worry about is managing your digital assets.

Repurpose, Don’t Recreate

A wise corporate blogger once said “In business, time is money.” That can apply to many different areas, but any smart businessperson knows that you don’t start from scratch when something good already exists. For DAM systems, that means having quick access to your media catalog to repurpose past brilliance rather than creating new ones, streamlining work flows and reducing deadline headaches. Don’t let your digital assets be one-hit wonders; with a DAM system, everything is available and ready to use. Money spent recreating assets is money wasted; think green and re-use, recycle, and re-purpose your digital assets.

Prevent Copyright Fees

Picture this: under a tight deadline, you’ve finally located the perfect image and stuck it into a brochure for an email marketing campaign. All is right in the world…until you discover the photo’s usage rights have expired. This opens up an avalanche of problems. First, the rightsholder may threaten to press charges or even worse, file a lawsuit. The whole campaign needs to be recalled – if the brochures were already printed, sealed, and prepped for mailing, they can’t leave the building. Then the whole campaign has to be redone, costing more than twice the amount it was originally, plus all of the legal fees involved. And on top of that, the legal department will hate you (or at the very least, talk about you behind your back). Violating copyright laws is not an easy fix, but a good DAM system can monitor rights to keep track of copyrights, permission usages, and more for each asset.

Improve Workflows

Digital workflow can be facilitated by digital asset management. Centralized assets allow universal access – people throughout the world can work together to produce, approve and share creative collateral. With a DAM, production times are reduced and teams can iterate faster and more efficiently. It just might be time to buy a new comfy couch for the office because you’ll finally be able to relax and really let your creativity flow.

Save money and increase team efficiency. Dedicate more time to quality work, sidestep costs and fees from hardware and legal, and don’t settle for a “doable” version of an amazing vision. Your team will finally have the time and resources to be limitless, all thanks to the simple idea of using a DAM system.

Digital Asset Management Software: To Build or To Buy

Jody Vandergriff — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 21:48:58 +0000

Within the digital asset management (DAM) community, return on investment, or ROI, is a hot topic. Businesses know they need a DAM, but clearly showing ROI to upper management isn’t always straightforward. Consultants and analysts have deconstructed the debate over and over. At WebDAM, we often hear a slightly different perspective – not so much a debate on ROI, but rather a case of paying an outside vendor for a solution (“buy”) vs. internally developing and maintaining a solution (“build”). DAM is becoming business-critical thanks to the exponential increase in digital media and most companies recognize the need to invest in it. These days, companies spend their time exploring the different ways to incorporate DAM. Should they create an in-house solution with complete control over features, workflow, and interfaces or should they use an outside vendor and focus solely on their core business? That’s the true dilemma facing companies these days – hence, buy vs. build.

Upon first glance, the “build” option seems to be a better way to go. After all, it’s a tailor-made solution developed and maintained by a company’s internal staff for total control. But upon closer inspection, choosing to “build” doesn’t quite seem as practical. Here’s a look at the key differences involved between “buy” and “build”:

Upfront development cost

Build: Building any type of software means an upfront investment in hardware requirements and software development – especially internally developed software designed to meet company specifications. It can be very difficult to estimate the total costs involved in development of a sophisticated software application, such as a DAM, especially when you consider the logistical side, such as facilities and personnel (project managers, engineers, testers, etc.).
Buy: Purchasing DAM software involves licensing fees or subscription costs (SaaS) and often a setup or installation fee. The costs are well-defined and known upfront.

Upfront development time

Build: Many companies quickly recognize the downside of development time. After all, it’s not just about writing the application’s code and testing it. There are meetings upon meetings for planning and design, proof-of-concept development, hardware/software coordination – all of that before the application goes into its first round of testing. Each stage could take anywhere from weeks to months, and the launch version could be several iterations away depending on the number of critical bugs discovered.
Buy: When you buy a DAM solution, the product is ready and the only requires a time investment for training.

Ongoing software maintenance

Build: A software application becomes outdated the moment it is released. That’s why updates and patches are released – not just to fix bugs, but to improve functionality and update features. For internally developed software, that means overhead cost for development, testing, and design as software becomes stale, systems evolve, or hardware demands grow. If a company doesn’t invest in this, it could lead to further problems down the line, just like a car that’s gone years without maintenance or oil changes.
Buy: When you buy DAM software, updates and maintenance are the responsibility of the provider. SaaS solutions often have the added benefit of rolling out new releases without additional licensing fees.

Software maturity

Build: Software takes time to reach a stable level, especially internally developed software. The term “mature” software applies when the application has a minimal amount of bugs, but this can take years of development and maintenance to achieve. It’s a continuously moving target that requires the effort of many engineers to overcome.
Buy: When you buy a DAM solution, it should arrive with a mature level of quality (assuming it is published by an established, reputable vendor).

Real-world issues

Build: Companies reorganize. Budgets get cut. Software engineers move or change jobs. When only a handful of people hold the keys to your internally developed DAM solution, any of these changes can represent a seismic shift in your application. How will you make the appropriate updates when budgets don’t allow for it or the lead developer leaves the company? These situations are impossible to predict and almost as difficult to adapt to.
Buy: When you buy a DAM solution, the provider’s business focuses on that product. It’s not merely an internally developed tool, it’s their source of revenue. Thus, significant resources will continue to be devoted to it regardless of personnel moves or organizational structure.

When you put it all side by side, the benefits of buying over building become clear. Of course, the built solution is totally customized, meaning that it is tailor-made for your internal workflows (assuming IT delivers upon expectations); there’s no need to shift or augment the way things are done. Bought solutions may require a company workflow to slightly adapt, and while this might provide an initial hump to overcome, staff members often prove more than capable of integrating a bought solution into their everyday tasks. Thus, when you lay out all the pros and cons, purchasing a DAM system can save time, money, and resources when compared to the effort required to build an in-house system.

Get Organized in 2010 with DAM

Jody Vandergriff — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 04:05:00 +0000

It is a little known fact that “Getting Organized” is considered one of the ten most popular New Year’s Resolutions year after year. After all, an organized life promises to save time, improve focus, and reduce stress. Well, the same can be said for your digital assets. When organized, your digital assets work for you – helping you complete projects efficiently and bring products to market. When they are not organized, however, your digital assets can actually hinder your product pipelines, acting as bottlenecks and fragmenting your workflows. Here is a list of the top 5 ways DAM gets you organized and saves time:

1. Find what you need, when you need it: Centralizing your digital assets means you will always know where to find your critical images, designs, and other assets exactly when you need them. DAM provides a framework to quickly search and browse through thousands of assets, a nearly impossible task if your files are scattered on hard drives, PCs, and DVDs. Web-based solutions for Digital Asset Management, such as WebDAM, further improve this benefit by ensuring your assets are accessible 24/7 anywhere in the world.

2. Reuse rather than regenerate: Hundreds of hours have gone into generating your digital creations, all to be used once, and then buried within the confines of a designer’s computer. Not anymore. With DAM, your assets are readily available and tagged with important meta-data such as how, when, and where a given file was used within your marketing campaigns. Easily find related images and image source files to promote reuse and allow you to more easily repurpose your hard work.

3. Remove the gatekeeper: If you are like many organizations, one department, or often times even a single individual, is responsible for fulfilling image requests coming from a number of sources including internal departments such as the web team, marketing, and PR to external associates, such as media professionals. There are three potentials pitfalls with this approach. First, you are relying heavily on the knowledge of a few individuals about where your files are located. What happens when they leave the company or change positions? Second, as your requests grow, it becomes impossible to fulfill each and every one while meeting deadlines. And last, once the requested assets are located, how do you deliver them to the recipient? Burning CDs or emailing large image files consumes enormous amounts of time. With DAM, image requests can be “self-fulfilled” by directly searching the DAM database and instantly retrieving exactly what is needed. Most DAM systems also include tracking capabilities to keep you on top of how your assets are being used and distribution tools to provide several mechanisms for efficiently delivering the digital files to the recipient.

4. Watch those copyrights: If you are handling rights-managed digital files, such as photos, knowing your usage rights is critical. Breaking copyrights is a costly mistake that no organization wants to make. So what do you do when you locate a photo but don’t know the terms upon which it was acquired? After much effort tracing the purchase, you will most likely opt to play it safe and purchase a new license. With DAM, you are not only tracking your digital files but also the critical meta-data associated to your files, such as copyright terms.

5. A race to the finish: From the previous four points, you can probably guess why DAM helps you meet deadlines and get products to market faster. Organizing your digital assets and the associated meta-data, means less time searching and more time producing. Many DAM tools go a step further by providing workflow integration and collaboration tools to actually facilitate your project pipelines. For example, WebDAM provides an online collaboration environment, called a Lightbox, enabling individuals to share project-specific files and swap notes and comments, resulting in faster collaborative turn-around.

In a future post, we will break down the DAM Return on Investment, or ROI, to see just how much time and money DAM can save your organization.