Revolutionizing the content supply chain for a global leader in recreational vehicles
The challenge
We are proud to have worked with a world leader in recreational vehicles and powersports on an exciting challenge: overhauling their content supply chain to scale up their content operations.
We began by fully understanding the client’s challenges and business needs.
First we assessed the client’s digital asset management (DAM). Our team pinpointed several opportunities to optimize workflows thus enabling the client to take full advantage of its digital asset management platform, AEM Assets.
With a growing demand for content in different formats, for different channels, and at a greater volume than ever, our client simply couldn’t achieve the content velocity it needed. With 88% of respondees to an Adobe survey reporting that demand for content has grown twofold since 2021 and that they expect demand to grow twenty-fold in the next two years, this is a widespread challenge that is pushing many companies to assess whether their content supply chain is up to the task.
Within their legacy content supply chain, in-house creatives would accept briefs via different channels, resulting in a lack of visibility, consistency, control, and data around asset production and its related resources and budgets. Members of the team were tracking content management on individual spreadsheets, meaning managers were unable to gain a birds-eye view of the content supply chain and therefore not able to strategize about how to improve their content delivery.
The creatives themselves faced an ineffective asset approval and editing process, which involved producing assets in the Creative Cloud, uploading them to Adobe Workfront for approvals, and manually uploading them into AEM Assets. Before this project, assets could take up to five days to be approved. Tagging assets could also take up to five days with many assets remaining untagged.
This led to poor version control, with a high degree of redundancy and duplication given multiple variations of the same asset lived on different platforms, without a holistic governance model for usage permissions. It could take up to four weeks to modify assets for re-versioning or following feedback. Many assets weren’t archived within our client’s DAM, leading to poor security and governance of historic content.
Thus, the team reached out to Cognizant Netcentric to help transform its asset management and end-to-end content delivery pipeline, bringing more scope for automation. They needed support cleaning up their assets, updating their metadata schema, improving their tagging process to incorporate smart tagging, and centralizing their naming processes. Above all, they wanted to stitch together their asset management systems to create a single source of truth that would increase productivity and collaboration for their teams.
The solution
Our client was already using Workfront, Adobe’s state-of-the-art project management software, for specific processes within the content supply chain. Essentially, assets were proofed in Workfront by seniors, but other asset delivery workflows lived on other platforms. Our client hadn’t taken full advantage of the power of Workfront to interface with Adobe Experience Manager and provide instant visibility through a centralized workflow dashboard.
At the heart of this solution was a wider adoption of Adobe Workfront and a better integration of our client’s Adobe systems to unlock more automated workflows and streamline and accelerate the content supply chain.
Before the project began, the team had consulted widely with stakeholders across its business to decide what the requirements for this transformation would be. They spoke to 42 stakeholders from 13 different business units and then analyzed the requirements against the business impact and level of delivery work required. During this phase, we investigated the unused capabilities within AEM assets that could be taken advantage of. These requirements were cross-checked against stakeholder interviews to make sure that individual pain points and frustrations would be solved through this bespoke solution.
Our experts worked closely with the client to define what Adobe Workfront could and couldn’t be leveraged for, and this became the foundation for our solution.
The business impact
This was a three-month-long process, with one month of discovery and project definition, and two months of implementation.
Once the business case and budgets were approved, we progressed with establishing a governance process through a Governance Review Board and building a tailored asset workflow. This included extra features like video and image renditions and watermark adding, as well as updates to pre-set user roles and permissions. The vision here was to “fix the foundation” of our client’s asset management.
At the same time, our experts worked on a rigorous asset clean-up: removing duplicate assets, editing ‘work in progress’ assets, and migrating assets from other drives to DAM. We also connected Adobe Analytics to our client’s DAM to generate data insight and reporting.
At this stage, we delivered some quick cost savings by reducing our client’s DAM licenses by implementing a brand portal, which creatives were trained on, and merging our client’s site’s DAM into AEM Assets.
Next came the process of establishing the team’s new tagging process, uniforming its naming conventions and folder hierarchy to make assets easier to find, and updating the metadata schema. We introduced smart tagging to reduce manual processes and drive more efficient asset searching and introduced more automation in the asset transformation process. Throughout the process, we carried out training for our client’s in-house creatives, bringing our expertise in change management to make sure teams felt empowered and informed about their new processes and tools.
The outcome
The outcome of this project is a transformed asset management pipeline and a centralized content delivery system.
This process is expected to deliver:
- 47% faster creation of assets by leveraging their DAM and Adobe Workfront for asset approvals
- 27% faster delivery through automated AI tagging
- 84% faster rendering of assets by adopting more DAM tools and taking full advantage of the capability of the Adobe Creative Cloud.
Our client is now equipped with a marketing system that enables them to track projects, spending, resource usage, and strategic alignment of their projects. Until now, they weren’t able to easily generate reporting on their asset management to stakeholders.
Today, they can generate customized reporting to build transparency and buy-in of their work across the business, with reports up to date in Workfront from the moment they are produced. The team can also allocate resources to ongoing projects and bolster teams when needed without having to request status updates and project breakdowns.
The team can now leverage a pre-established governance model for appropriate usage of assets, user access, and permissions. They will benefit from better return on investment on their systems with more integrated DAM capabilities across the entire asset lifecycle, helping them to cut costs and increase efficiency and content velocity.
Fundamentally, the project is expected to increase the productivity of our client’s digital teams by 19%, with less duplication of assets and frictionless collaboration.
They can confidently deliver content at scale to keep pace with today’s accelerating, content-first landscape while keeping its governance, systems, and processes robust.
Cognizant Netcentric was proud to be part of this project, combining our knowledge of our client’s business priorities, and our expertise in delivering content at scale, to deliver a future-proof solution.
Get in touch
Optimizing your workflow is key to innovation and long-term business impact. Talk to us to learn how we can revolutionize your content supply chain, enable greater productivity, content velocity and deliver real business impact.
