Digital Asset Management for Manufacturing

In the fast-paced world of manufacturing, efficient management of digital assets is crucial for streamlining operations, maintaining brand consistency, and ensuring regulatory compliance. With the exponential growth of digital content, manufacturing companies are turning to digital asset management (DAM) systems to organize, store, and distribute their digital assets more efficiently. 

When you want to improve consistency of product imagery, grow brand equity, and distribute content to global teams, email attachments and Google Drive links just don’t cut it. Neither do DAM systems or cloud storage tools without all the features you need to coordinate across country regulations, time zones, and teams. Global manufacturing brands use DAM software to centralize their many thousands of digital assets and give every person and system access to the content they need. 

This improves creative workflow efficiency, product information accuracy, and can help you integrate your content across software platforms and channels. Acquia DAM (Widen) is a leading platform in the DAM space. We work directly with global manufacturing companies to help them get the most out of their digital assets. Let’s take a closer look at how.

Why do manufacturing companies need DAM?

You can’t afford to try and keep track of all your brand assets, product content, and marketing collateral the old-fashioned way. Manufacturing companies are experts at creating physical products, but most also rely on DAM technology for efficient management of digital assets, including product images, videos, audio, PDFs, and technical documents. 

As a centralized repository, a DAM solution gives you easy and advanced asset organization through metadata, quick sharing capabilities, and robust permissioning structures to save you valuable time and increase workflow efficiency. Manufacturing teams can quickly access the right assets when needed from anywhere in the world – streamlining product development, marketing campaigns, and sales processes. 

Brand consistency is another crucial factor for manufacturing companies with multiple product lines and diverse departments. Using a DAM system ensures approved brand assets (e.g., logos, campaign templates, and brand imagery) are easily accessible and properly used across the organization. By focusing on brand consistency, you enhance your overall brand image, improve customer perception, and build customer loyalty. 

And that’s just the start. 

How is DAM used in manufacturing?

DAM is used in manufacturing for everything from improving creative and marketing workflows to integrating your digital assets across all back-end systems. With a DAM solution in place, your marketing and sales teams can both access the latest campaign materials and collateral to communicate consistent messages and information. 

As a manufacturer, supply chain operations are paramount to reducing time to market. You need to get your suppliers and partners the right information and product materials at scale quickly. A DAM platform enables collaboration through functionality like curated content collections and version control that make sure everyone is only using up-to-date assets approved by your internal creative teams. 

Getting compliance, documentation, regulatory demands, rights management, and data security correct is also critical for manufacturing companies. This requires many documents, chains of approval, and absolute certainty your teams are using the right digital assets across your supply chain.

DAM systems provide a secure platform to store and manage compliance-related documents, certifications, and regulatory standards — they also contribute to intellectual property protection by enforcing access controls and permissions. This is one of the best ways to ensure that proprietary designs and patents are safeguarded

Improve the creative workflow

Simpson Strong-Tie uses their DAM solution to improve the speed and accuracy of their creative workflows. Before investing in a DAM solution, their marketing team lacked a single source of truth for the photos, illustrations, videos, and other digital assets associated with their products. That meant their designers spent more time looking for files versus focusing on their creative workflow.

Now, their DAM site houses all of their 64,000 digital assets in one central location. That means everyone has secure access to the same version of illustrations, logos, and product imagery instead of wasting hours searching through endless files. And when an illustration, video, image, or other creative assets is edited — because products constantly change — updates only need to be made once to show up on all digital properties thanks to version control and embed codes. 

To get all their technology “talking,” Simpson Strong-Tie integrated Acquia DAM with their other go-to marketing systems — their design software (Adobe Creative Cloud), product information management (PIM) platform (Hybris), and a sales-enablement tool (Modus). Acquia DAM powers everything from their print catalog to their website’s product library, sales collateral, and marketing materials. 

Now the whole company doesn’t need to rely on the marketing or creative teams every time they need to find a file, and their designers can focus on more meaningful work. 

Distribute on-brand content

Alliance Laundry Systems started using Acquia DAM to give remote teams, distributors, partner agencies, and other stakeholders across the globe quick access to the content they need to do their job. Before this, their existing DAM solution lacked the functionality to scale with their global content operations across 18 countries. And besides the content inefficiencies, their previous DAM platform didn’t comply with requirements in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). That was what sent them looking for a new DAM tool. 

With Acquia DAM, all their content is up-to-date, on-brand, and in compliance with GDPR. Users across the globe — including external partners — have streamlined access to digital assets (with the right permissions, of course). In fact, during the first few months of use, they had 27,000 downloads from partners who needed images or logo files to make vital creative assets.

Alliance also uses embed codes to streamline content publishing through a create once, publish everywhere (COPE) strategy. All their images are hosted in Acquia DAM instead of on the website. That means every time a new version of an asset is uploaded to their DAM site, it’s automatically updated everywhere it’s embedded on the web. 

Image requests that used to take days to fulfill (especially across time zones) have also been eliminated. Now, everyone can find the exact asset they need, when they need it. 

Integrate with other platforms

The usefulness of a DAM solution cascades across every platform in a manufacturer’s digital ecosystem that depends on digital assets. Acquia DAM seamlessly connects and synchronizes with everything from enterprise PIM platforms like Hybris to creative platforms like Adobe Creative Cloud. 

You can optimize publishing across your website and social channels and increase efficiency across sales, merchandising, and customer support. Product lifecycle management (PLM) platforms, content management systems (CMS), and supply chain management platforms can all share the same up-to-date digital assets. 

Acquia DAM integrations enable the exchange of digital assets between systems, streamline workflows, enhance collaboration, and ensure consistent and accurate information across your manufacturing ecosystem. It allows users to access, manage, and share digital assets directly within the tools they use every day, optimizing productivity, data integrity, and operational efficiency.

Getting started 

Content organization and production for manufacturing can be complicated, but using the right DAM system for manufacturing really does make everything easier. With Acquia DAM, you’ll quickly improve creative workflows, distribute timely and on-brand content, and integrate seamlessly with other platforms in your technology stack. 

No more wasted time searching for the right asset, waiting for teams across the globe to wake up, or damaging brand consistency with outdated brand assets. Request a demo today to see how our DAM solution can improve the overall efficiency and accuracy in your manufacturing process.