The REAL Cost of Distributing Your Digital Assets
Organizational Challenge: The REAL Cost of Distributing Your Content
Depending on your organization, the staff that handles your graphics may be manually fulfilling a handful of image requests each week or perhaps hundreds of image requests each week. The real labor costs and organizational costs associated with this fulfillment process is much greater than most realize. Through a web based DAM process you can instantly fulfill business user image requests.
In most companies, a business partner requests for images are communicated to the sales person, then to the advertising or marketing department. This consumes valuable sales time and often complicates the process since the sales person may not be technically familiar with graphic options needed for print advertising. Requests for images/files are then fulfilled by burning to CD and/or sending out via email with a fulfillment time that may span several days. Since these requests may have already been routed through several people, the actual time from when the customer made the request until they receive a CD or email could be a week or longer. The common misperception is that sending out these images by email is both “instant” and “free”. The reality is that several members of the organization have spent time coordinating these requests and the individual that locates and sends the images may still have significant time into the process. When time, material and shipping costs are multiplied by hundreds or thousands of requests the real cost in dollars and organizational time for fulfilling images this way becomes quite significant.
Consider these questions as you evaluate the real cost for distributing your content:
• How many email & CD requests does your staff fulfill each month?
• How much time does your sales force spend communicating these requests?
• How long do your customers have to wait to get the files they need?
As you add up the financial cost, organizational distraction and customer frustration from manually fulfilling images, keep in mind the process used by Honeycomb Archive. Industry leaders that are using Honeycomb Archive may average hundreds or thousands of requests each month that are self-fulfilled by their end users. Since their digital asset management system provides a mechanism for self-service fulfillment, they are able to eliminate thousands of dollars in monthly costs while providing a much higher level of service to their retailers and sales force who need digital materials immediately.
These users search and browse categories to quickly find the digital media that they need for their printed ads and sales presentations. Since the content is organized into a category structure that fits their organization and includes visual previews of the graphics, it is easy for users to find what they need. All of the desired image selections are then instantly downloaded or shared. Additionally since Honeycomb Archive supports multiple libraries of digital assets, users are able to have a general library that includes the publicly available imagery as well as private libraries of exclusive sales materials that are securely accessed by user login by their sales force. They can even configure tailored libraries for business users that are offered exclusive imagery.
