Challenges faced by companies in large DAM projects using the example of one of our customers:
Tens of thousands of new products are integrated into their own portfolio every year. This means that the inventory of assets increases by around 1,000,000 new digital formats every year. The variety of communication channels with specific requirements is large and constantly growing. The same goes for the increasing number of systems that require assets.
There are also many external and internal stakeholders: employees, customers, hundreds of suppliers, many agencies, 3D agencies, etc.
More than 30 national companies worldwide need assets. The relevant product information with images must be published in advertising by the deadline. In addition, different departments often have established different, historically grown processes.
Organize processes along the content supply chain
Even for a few assets, customers have many processes that need to be organized along the content supply chain: - Determine needs - Assets are procured and ordered from agencies - These are delivered and checked - there are approval and correction processes - Files are converted, researched and enriched with information (metadata). - Assets must be provided by the deadline... - and delivered to stakeholders, channels and systems - License management and archiving
Problems with a lack of automation/digitization
Weaknesses at various points in the process chain multiply enormously when it comes to mass data. Manual intermediate steps such as coordination with agencies, manual forwarding of data, checks, or even non-transparent interfaces between systems lead to extremely high costs - multiplied by the sheer mass of data. These costs can hardly and not be meaningfully compensated for by additional employees.
Objectives for large projects:
The first priority is to build a largely fully automated and digitized content supply chain for assets - consistently from the supplier to the customer - in terms of process, data technology and system technology
CELUM in the context of high-level automation
A solid solution is developed in an agile and ongoing manner. The content supply chain is being automated and digitized step by step. The following requirements are necessary for this:
Process analysis: An agile process analysis along the content supply chain: Where are there weak points? Which (sub-)processes can be digitized well and in which sub-areas is the highest business value achieved? This creates a business value-oriented roadmap.
CELUM as backbone: CELUM forms the central backbone of an overall solution. The system is the target and source for all assets in the company and provides assets in a wide variety of derivatives for all stakeholders and all systems - simple and easy to research.
Modern system architecture: CELUM also offers extensive event management and a fast API that can be used to easily expand automation processes. A solid platform for microservices is the prerequisite for the development of automation processes. The microservices automatically take over many tasks in CELUM and beyond that would otherwise have to be done manually.
These include, for example: - technical and professional testing of assets upon delivery - Forwarding assets to other systems - automated maintenance of metadata for assets - Archiving of assets - Taking over or initiating release processes and much more. m.
Microservices are also scalable and lightweight, and can be adapted and expanded. In this way, more and more individual sub-processes can be digitized and automated easily and selectively.
Automation requires meaningfully digitized data structures
In order for assets to be processed automatically as part of the content supply chain, they must be stored in a data-structured manner at all times in the process chain. This is the only way they can be used digitally. This means that they must be identifiable via metadata from people as well as from microservices. It must be clear and evaluable what condition the assets are in, what type of asset they are, what properties the asset has and what quality it is, etc. Procedural information is also important (use, licensing, relevant advertising dates). For large projects, this information cannot be maintained manually. There must be automated mechanisms through which as much relevant metadata as possible is linked to the assets.
One option for this is to link the assets with data from other systems, which are previously structured in a data pool and then linked to the CELUM assets. This enables seamless research for assets using the CELUM interface across data provided from multiple systems. AI assistants also support further tagging of assets, which in turn minimizes manual processing effort.
Conclusion: Compact overall solution with CELUM at the center
In this way, an agile process creates a compact overall solution with which the most relevant and valuable sub-processes of the content supply chain are successively automated.
- from the supplier to the output channels
- with CELUM as a fully-fledged DAM system at the center
- a microservices-based, scalable and easily expandable automation platform around CELUM
- as well as a structured data pool for the digital storage of all metadata relevant for automation