Success Story: Transforming the Artwork Approval Process
The process for creating and approving artwork was too complex and stretched beyond 150 days, hampering productivity and efficiency. Despite the need for change, the team had to work within the boundaries of an existing artwork management system. To tackle this, the team launched a series of transformative initiatives. They held insightful Voice of Customer sessions, diving deep into the current process to understand what worked and what didn’t. This led to a thorough documentation of the "as-is" state. A comprehensive process map was developed, shedding light on key steps, inputs, and outputs. The team meticulously analyzed the number of documents and approvals required, documenting the time each step took. Through these strategic efforts, the number of required documents was slashed from 15 to just 4. Approvals were streamlined from as many as 17 down to 4. Most impressively, the time to create and approve artwork plummeted from over 150 days to a mere 75 days.
Success Story: Custom Artwork Application and Digital Content
The existing artwork approval process was a major hurdle, with content requiring re-creation for every revision. The lengthy time frame and varying metrics across regions emphasized the need for a unified process. Voice of Customer sessions were conducted in each region to gather insights into what worked and what didn't. The collaboration with business partners helped to design a future-state process focused on efficiency. The process was broken into a series of steps. Content was divided into data elements, with discussions leading to streamlined roles and responsibilities. A custom built application was developed to optimize content collection and support the new ways of working. Metrics for tracking content rejections, approvals, and role-based training were incorporated to support the new system. Metrics were successfully aligned across regions with a digital content process that facilitated content re-use. Artwork approval times were slashed from 75 days to just 35 days.
Success Story: Digital Transformation and the Artwork Process
The challenge was to create a fully digitized artwork process while improving quality of artwork and addressing business partner feedback. The team conducted a search of existing solutions and settled on a specific out of the box SaaS application. Desirable features such as a content library capable of storing local language translations, SKU based storage and the possibility of automatically generating artwork drove the final decision. Further global harmonization of the business process was achieved through Voice of Customer feedback, specifically defining content rules to standardize statements within and across brands. Responsibility for content in the system shifted to a smaller team of trained users maintaining data integrity. Training was designed based on the simplified business process and system interactions. Content re-use increased, reducing business partner workload by at least 40%. Only content that requires revision is changed, improving quality of artwork.