Assessing Assets in the Networked Economy

Digital asset management's promise is in streamlining workflows, strengthening client relationships, and creating new revenue.

By Lisa Leland, Associate Editor -- Graphic Arts Online, 11/1/2000

There's no area of the publishing world that hasn't felt the impact of the Web, and digital asset management (DAM) certainly is no exception. The acceleration of digital publishing workflow installations along with the emergence of interactive distribution channels has resulted in skyrocketing digital content creation.

It comes, then, as somewhat of a surprise that the amount of attention given to the technology--at last count, 250 vendors offer DAM and content management services--is dramatically disproportionate to the amount of business, at least in the graphic arts industry, where adoption is still in its earliest phase.

"As businesses transition from hard goods and equipment-based solutions to the next reality of 'bits and bytes' in a networked economy, much broader out-of-the-box thinking must occur to deal with digital data's growing and permanent place in the world of business," says John Jebens.

Jebens, the customer solutions team manager for Wam!Net, Eagan, Minn., a pioneer vendor of DAM solutions for the printing industry, adds, "As we become better connected, people in companies all over the world are generating millions of files a day--graphic, animation, video, music, sound--and it's piling up at an alarming rate."

Jebens quotes a study conducted by the Lakespur, Calif.-based research firm Gistics that reports that, in the graphic arts industry alone, digital media asset files at individual user desktops are expected to increase at least 200% over the next three years.

"Strategic thinking surrounding this topic will become a necessary core competency to compete, let alone remain competitive," Jebens asserts.

Key applications

Without question, DAM as a core strategy is being driven by a few key applications: e-commerce, one-to-one marketing, and custom publishing. The breadth of the DAM sphere now extends far beyond promotional pictures and text, and continues to add new entrants daily as a result of a networked economy: training materials, billing statements, financial transaction records, legal documents, insurance forms, audio and video clips, and more.

These assets need to be shared by different departments as well as suppliers and customers on the outside.

Insofar as deployments are concerned, they're being driven by forward-looking companies and organizations that realize the payoffs in lower costs, better quality, faster production cycles, and incrementally increased revenue through reuse, repurposing, and redistribution of intellectual property.

Defining the DAM term

Gistics defines DAM as the "systematic organization of digital media files, enabling an authorized individual to quickly find, retrieve, and/or route an item to an authorized or designated person or into a work process."

The organization says that 30% of a company's brand-related print expenditures are either lost or duplicated. Those who adopt a DAM strategy, according to the research firm's findings, will spend 36% less time transferring files, 28% less time reorganizing files, 14% less time locating files, and 13% less time tracking multiple-version files.

The International Prepress Association's own study on DAM opportunities--a six-part series assessing the value and commitment involved in providing DAM services--reports feedback from corporate customers on the need for much more than just storage requirements. These services must now interface with corporate systems, allow remote access to multiple prepress competitors, and provide a process to create and manipulate data on line.

Here, DAM is likened to an application service provider model, where a printer might hold the assets on a central server and a company accesses them via a Web browser. Browser-based interfaces for asset management systems are the current "must-have" features, allowing the sharing of assets among users in disparate locations. With these interfaces, assets can be added, deleted, or modified via the Web.

Production payoffs

For Bloomington Offset Press Inc. (BOPI), digital asset management is a core part of its upgraded production environment, which is now based on a Rampage RIP digital workflow, testifies Jason Wiley, director of computer services for the company. The 53-year-old Bloomington, Ill.-based company grew from $8.7 million in annual revenue in 1997 to $11.1 million in 1999.

"The biggest value we have as printers with the Internet is not so much the business-to-business or business-to-customer e-commerce like the Nooshes, Impresses, and printCafes have tried to push, but actual production cycle efficiencies like soft proofing and being able to use thumbnail-based DAM software to view PostScript PDF files via the Internet," says Wiley, who considers DAM the best return on investment (ROI) for a printer's stake in networking, telecommunication, and bandwidth equipment.

"I receive so many high-end color projects that the Internet is never going to be a point-and-click shopping cart for me," Wiley states. "How the Internet lends itself to an ROI-based strategy for us is in decreasing our print cycle as well as promoting our organization through DAM.

"Not only will we be able to thumbnail PostScript data, but, for a lot of my customers that do not have servers or high-end electronic networking capabilities, they will be able to use a portion of my network to see their logos and electronic graphic resources, and will be able to click on them to download."

Where Wiley primarily sees DAM's business-expanding potential is in its ability to bridge geographic limitations. "If my sales rep in Chicago, which is 50 miles from us, can offer the same turnaround time as a local printer down the street from the design agency, I can compete with a whole new market," he says "That's truly where the benefit of the Internet and DAM will come together."

Filling the need

In August at the Seybold San Francisco printing and publishing event, Bruce Watermann spoke about DAM's potential for the publishing industry in the new Internet economy.

The former vice president of production for Pacific Color and current vice president for eSKU.com, an international outfit that consults with start-up Internet operations looking to digitize their assets, said that there currently is "hardly any" repurposing of images for e-retailers. Most people are forced to scan their own content, he stated.

"Looking at all these factors, it is a great time to be part of the imaging world--there are lots of opportunities in the DAM arena," says Watermann. "Digital asset management really offers an opportunity to upgrade production systems while improving your ability to control the flow of work; create assets that are consistent from person to person, shift to shift, and location to location; easily retrieve assets from the system using computer power rather than people power; and publish to various media, which is a big issue these days and can make your operation a profit center rather than just a service provider."

Customer focus wins

Lauren Flannagan, chief executive of WebWare Corporation, a Sausalito, Calif.-based provider of DAM solutions including the Mambo product family, believes that when it comes to printers tailoring a DAM system for customer retention and maximum profit/value-added returns, the ones who know their customers' business problems best will win the business.

"If there's one reason why DAM hasn't taken off as fast as people have predicted, it's that printers are focused on the technology versus the problems people have with DAM and how to solve them," says Flannagan. "Printers need to realize that they are just one piece of an overall supply chain. The true value for the actual asset owner is that any of their brand or marketing assets can be used anywhere in the world for any cross-media purpose and format. All of the supply chain members support that goal of providing systematic reuse of the product.

"This is what is meant by printers working themselves more tightly into the fabric of their customers. They become a more valued member of the supply chain if they say, 'By the way, since we have these high-end RGB scans, we can help you downsample them for reuse on the Web site,' and that's actually a form of new revenue for the printer."

Mambo introduction

At Seybold San Francisco, WebWare introduced version 2.0 of Mambo, which is available as both a deployed and application service provider (ASP) solution. Mambo enables users to organize, secure, publish, and distribute content over the Web.

"One of the defining features of our products is that they were designed for the Web--not Web-grafted-on or Web-enabled," says Flannagan, who adds that new features of Mambo include hierarchically controlled vocabulary as well as Unicode double-byte and font family support for simultaneous use in multiple languages (e.g. the word "apple" can now be categorized, localized, and searched in various languages by multiple users across the globe).

In a strategic alliance with Applied Graphics Technologies (AGT), Vio Worldwide Ltd., King of Prussia, Pa., introduced at Seybold San Francisco its M-Cast offering, a network-based DAM archiving and distribution service aimed at printers wishing to avoid costly upfront investments in both hardware and software.

Pay-as-you-go pricing

Users first must be connected to the Vio network in order to subscribe. With a pay-as-you-go pricing model, the scalable system allows assets to be annotated, stored, and accessed as part of the company's local, national, and global networks.

Clients can remotely access the archive and view their assets on line over the Vio network or the Web.

Wam!Net used the Seybold event to launch its new WorkSpace on-line service. This offering provides collaborative workgroups--including corporate clients, ad agencies, and Web site developers--with accessible storage for works-in-progress while using other tools like RealTimeProof for soft proofing and annotation.

Company officials say that WorkSpace's new image-repurposing tool performs basic file conversion for resolution, color space, and file type.

Kind of "virtual hard drive"

"There's a lot of structured data that has metadata when looking at asset management," explains Wam!Net technology strategist Mitch Prust. "WorkSpace is kind of like a virtual hard drive, offering a more logical way to do work-in-process with unstructured data. Also, where getting Photoshop and an archive to work together at the browser level has always been tricky, WorkSpace eliminates the problem altogether."

Prust adds that a newly upgraded Wam!Base archive service offers batch uploading of metadata and automatic indexing of files, which thereby reduces the amount of time needed to upload and categorize assets.

Canto's recently introduced Cumulus 5 Workgroup organizes assets into catalogs. Cumulus 5 offers its own system for network managers to maintain and distribute large collections of intellectual assets to workgroups and clients. Here, each catalog includes a record for every asset cataloged, and keeps track of the metadata associated with the asset.

Other features include output to HTML, support for PDF job ticketing, customizable record and category fields, and complete access to the user interface.

An enterprise perspective

Looking at DAM from an enterprise-level solution perspective, Charles Lee, senior product manager for Artesia Technologies, Rockford, Md., foresees DAM replacing enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems as the bedrock of back-office operations in the networked economy.

At the enterprise level, Artesia has introduced Teams 4.0, an open and scalable solution enabling the import of all types of rich media through filters that automatically enrich content with physical descriptive properties. Says Lee, the 4.0 release is focused on enhanced support of streaming media, increased end-user functionality through the Web interface, and open application program interfaces for greater flexibility.

The new version also extends Artesia's ability to integrate with Quark-based production environments, and will automatically generate thumbnail proxies for both Quark and PDF files during input for use in later search-and-retrieval operations.

Lee says that Teams recently was adopted by publishing giant Random House for the enterprise-wide digital archival of all its new and existing titles, as well as for all of its electronic operations.

Centralized archive

"When you consider enterprise-wide DAM as opposed to desktop or workgroup DAM, you're talking about a centralized archive for your entire concern," Lee explains. "It is designed to handle all your assets, from marketing to engineering, and enables everyone to get to this information through a Web-browser interface and then reuse or repurpose that content for new organizational objectives."

A new version of Banta Integrated Media's enterprise-level content management system, Bmedia 2.5, comes with a new Web client and an automatic batch content import/export facility. The latter enables users to create batch processes for import assets and blocks, link assets and products to blocks, search for content, and retrieve, change, and delete information.

Users from both inside and outside the Banta corporate network are able to gain access via a streamlined user interface using standard Web browser software.

While Banta previously sold its Bmedia software directly to major catalogers and publishers as part of their enterprise software implementation, it has now established ASP service for smaller, mid-range companies, using a pay-as-you-go model.

"While publishers and catalogers are increasingly recognizing the urgency of moving to a workflow model in which a digital content management system plays a crucial role, they aren't all able to make that kind of hardware and software investment," says Preston Walklet, president of the Chanhassen, Minn.-based Banta Digital Group facility.

He says, "Bmedia allows them to leverage Banta's large-scale infrastructure investment to reap benefits in print, on-line, or cross-media publishing environments."

Making it work

Among DAM solutions aimed at prepress shops, Inso's MediaBank was the product of choice for Smurfit Graphic Arts, Dayton, Ohio.

Smurfit purchased the system two years ago with the expectation of making DAM work, not only as a means of streamlining the prepress firm's digital workflow and providing value-added service to customers, but to foster new business opportunities by offering revenue-generating asset management services to customers around the globe.

So far, though, says Smurfit systems applications specialist Sam Cox, only three of the company's clients--SlimFast, Frozen Specialties, and Roth Labs--have signed on, pulling low-res images from the MediaBank system for the desktop design of their packaging products.

Cox believes the stumbling blocks have been in educating clients on the new services his company offers via DAM, as well as getting them to embrace change and break away from a set pattern of handling tasks. Moreover, he says, production managers, who are usually ones to receive the initial pitch, either do not fully grasp the benefits of DAM or see it as a threat to their livelihoods.

Uploading, downloading files

"MediaBank's Web capabilities allow users to share digital assets globally with subsidiaries, satellite offices, partners, vendors, and customers," Cox states. "Users can upload and download files or view information, being limited only by their access privileges, which MediaBank lets you specify down to the project and file level.

"The biggest obstacles are promoting it, selling it, and pricing it. Regarding the latter, we at Smurfit are looking at the MediaBank system as a value-added service, making it much less likely for clients to go elsewhere based on price."

Cox adds that not only are Smurfit sales people well versed in the advantages of the firm's DAM services, but they are trained to provide comprehensive on-site demonstrations at client locations.

Despite the slow rate of acceptance, Cox sees a bright future in the use of DAM to build brand awareness, reach new markets, and deploy new products or services.

"When we first got into DAM two years ago, it was virtually unheard of," he says. "Now it has really become the topic of conversation, which tells me that it's good to already be in it. Despite the learning curve, we truly realize the benefits it holds for Web-based workflows."