With the increasing rate at which regulations have been changing, there is a good chance your company could be faced with mass packaging changes in short periods of time. If you find yourself in this position, here’s a great example to follow.
On April 26, 2016 at the BLUE User Conference, USG Corporation’s Director of Integrated Marketing, Mark Joseph, delivered his presentation “Building Core Capability.” One of a select few industry leaders chosen to present at the conference, Mark shared a challenge that USG had been faced with: a need to meet the deadline for OSHA’s pending Globally Harmonized System of Classification and Labeling of Chemicals, which coincided with an initiative to overhaul USG’s brand identity. This not only included packaging changes, but the need to convert more than 1,000 Material Safety Data Sheets into new Safety Data Sheets that they needed to post on their website and provide to their distributors. Along with the need for these new Safety Data Sheets was the need to translate them into French and Spanish. Using a manual process consisting of four contract employees using a physical job bag system and only a nine-month window, a seemingly impossible task loomed.
1. Assess the Task Ahead
Assessment seems logical, right? But somewhere between panicking (which isn’t necessary, by the way) and taking decisive action, you need to take a deep breath and document at the scope of what needs to be done before planning any further. In this case, USG discovered that they would need to make changes on over 800 packages within the aforementioned nine-month window. They also crunched the numbers and realized that in a typical year, they processed only about 200-250 package changes. They’d have to practically quadruple their annual package processing numbers and do it in three fewer months.
2. Hire the Right Personnel for Success
USG knew the challenge that lay ahead, but they lacked a team that could realistically help them achieve it. A search began to add a product manager, two packaging production managers and a copy developer, to round out the packaging department. After a short search, and settling on a team with the right experience, they were onto the next step.
3. Choose the Right Partners
Having the right people in place is of paramount importance, but this task, and many like it, called for more than a manual process to put employees, and therefore the company, in the best position to succeed. USG put out an RFP for a software solution that could help them hit the impending OSHA deadline in the short term, while transforming their workflow process in the long term. They chose to go with a SGK’s Brandimage for the overall strategic design direction for their product line. The design firm refreshed the design on approximately 50 primary SKUs, with adaptations for the various forms and sizes for the remainder of the packages. Next came a crucial step in the process.
4. Find Software That Can Digitize and Expedite the Work
The pre-media company that USG chose was working with a robust Brand Lifecycle Management software (BLM) that was uniquely qualified to help them hit the deadline. It offered a workflow routing system that had a dramatic and immediate effect. Even long time employees who were resistant to change began to realize that this BLM offered them capabilities that they hadn’t realized they were missing out on. Suddenly project timeframes became crystal clear. The ability to keep track of who was responsible for which tasks by simply going to a single page added a level of visibility and tracking that USG didn’t have before. Online proofing made sharing large files and collaboration over changes and approvals a far simpler process that could also be achieved remotely. Finally, this BLM came with a Digital Asset Library (DAL) that allowed USG to store the entirety of their packaging and marketing collateral in one centralized location. This BLM, of course, was BLUE.
5. Reap the Rewards
The project was a mammoth success. Brandimage gave USG a new, cohesive design and BLUE helped USG create an end to end workflow management process and hit the deadline. In doing so, using BLUE helped USG increase their productivity by a whopping 4x. USG had overhauled their system and created a packaging department that was modern, efficient and cost effective, which was just the beginning of their relationship with BLUE.
Watch the video of Mark Joseph’s BLUE User Conference Presentation “Building Core Capability” in its entirety (23 mins) for more on how SGK, USG and BLUE worked together to meet OSHA’s requirements, and what they’re doing next.
