In the first of this three part series I covered the numbers: The ROI calculation. It’s a critical piece for building a business case, but it’s not the only piece. Another factor management will take into strong consideration when deciding which projects get the green light is how well they align with corporate strategic initiatives.
All businesses have them. Those near and long-term strategic plans that go into an annual report and give the organization direction and set priorities. Not sure what your organization’s are? Ask. What you find out might be useful to your business case.
Here are some real-world examples of strategic initiatives:
- To bring innovations to the market faster
- To build a continuous improvement culture
- To increase global brand consistency
- To standardize and simplify our business process, data and IT systems
- To reduce our impact on the environment
Once you know what yours are, ask yourself this - Is an Artwork Management System (AMS) an enabler to any of your strategic initiatives? Chances are, it will be for several of them. If you can make a solid connection it will make your business case stronger.
Using the examples above, here are some suggestions for making that connection:
Speed-to-market. If you can create and change your labels faster and more efficiently, you remove a potential bottleneck to getting your products to market faster. There are several numbers in the ROI calculator related to reduced cycles required, faster turnaround time, etc.
Another way to consider this is to ask the following – Is there a value in delivering my product to market one day, or one week faster than my competitors? If you can produce quality labeling faster and that gets a product to market faster, there’s a revenue opportunity you would otherwise be missing out on.
Continuous Improvement. If the AMS you’re considering has robust Key Performance Indicator reports, you’ll have what you need to analyze how you and your vendors are performing. And the system will highlight bottlenecks and other opportunities for continuous improvement.
Brand Consistency. Wherever you are in the world, does your brand look the same? With a properly version controlled asset repository you can more easily manage consistency by ensuring everyone has access to templates, guidelines, and approved assets in a controlled way.
Standardized Processes, Data and IT systems. This bucket is perhaps the easiest to align to. Since an AMS is managing the process of artwork creation and approvals, one major benefit is the ability to standardize these processes using the tool. Using an AMS can drive consistency and standardization into data collected, approvers and tasks, so that no matter where you are in the world, your artwork is being created and approved the same way. If the AMS you’re considering also has integration capability, you can consider integrating it to your Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) system, creating one seamless workflow for your products.
Sustainability. Still using hardcopy job folders? How many color printouts do you produce to gain approval?
You may not be able to tie a dollar value to each of the above and that’s okay. It’s still worth considering how your project aligns to your strategic initiatives and connecting those dots in your business case.
Are we done yet? Not quite. There’s one more piece to the Business Case. In the next post I’ll cover the “What if I don’t do anything?” perspective to bring all of the pieces together.
Jackie Leslie is a Senior Business Development Engineer at Schawk Digital Solutions.
[This post includes titles and references to Schawk that preceded December 21, 2014, when Diversis, a Private Equity firm, acquired a majority share of BLUE, creating BLUE Software, LLC.]
