And it's not "Herding Cats"

The challenges of digital asset management are here to stay. What’s more, they’re becoming increasingly complex as a consequence of the exponential growth of assets being created by businesses around the world. Without a robust, easy-to-use solution, you might as well be herding cats.

According to findings from GISTICS Research, a good Digital Asset Management solution can carve the amount of time people spend on file management by more than 85%. When you consider that organisations spend an average of $8,200 per person every year on file management activities, it’s a compelling ROI story.

“To say that there’s a variation in the way companies manage their digital assets is serious understatement,” says Andrew Baker, CEO of Sesimi.  “As a Brand Automation platform, we’re uniquely positioned to recognise the importance of Asset Management and the different ways organisations are storing and handling their files. We developed a Digital Asset Management (DAM) module as one of our six core products to sit at the heart of our Brand Automation system and it’s done an incredible job of removing Digital Asset angst for our clients and saving them tremendous amounts of time.”

“Sesimi's Creative Automation module might be the star of the show,” says Sesimi CTO, Paul Volpato, “But it’s nothing without the DAM - we invested huge amounts of development time in making sure we had a world class Digital Asset Management solution that drives our content creation offering.”  Volpato believes the careful design of the DAM has been critical in its success. “If a DAM system isn’t intuitive - whether that be due to a poorly designed interface or lack of thought around metadata development - or both - it’s pretty much doomed. Users vote with their feet - that’s why we concentrated on designing a smooth UI and crafting a lot of smarts behind the scenes to track and classify assets cleverly so they’re easy to find and control.”

Nothing is more frustrating than an over-cluttered, over-segmented interface that is clunky and convoluted - and because the DAM sits at the heart of the Sesimi platform, distributing a multitude of assets for the creation of advertising content, it simply had to be a streamlined system in its own right. “It’s important that Sesimi's DAM isn’t overcomplicated - but that doesn’t mean it isn’t powerful,” Volpato says. “Our product offers the ability to manage the whole lifecycle of a digital asset, organising elements in ways that allow for creation, management, distribution and ultimately either preservation or archiving.”

The Sesimi DAM has brought a level of control to clients that has driven huge time savings to the bottom line. ‘We’re getting feedback that client campaigns are quicker to kick off - from weeks into days, sometimes hours,” Volpato says. “And then there’s the benefits of consistency and clarity around asset use - the DAM provides Head Offices with the ability to instantly push updated brand assets to their entire network which guarantees that network points have the most recent brand assets.”

Baker sees the DAM module playing a vital role in the relationship between Head Offices and their networks. “Apart from the fact that Head Office is able to cleanse the asset register to ensure everything is up to date and approved for use, it conveys to their network that they are serious about investing in the brand. The quality of the interface and the superior functionality empowers the network. They become engaged and it’s a win all round.”

The intelligent simplicity of Sesimi DAM UI is critical in getting users to engage with the platform. “We have so many different kinds of users in so many different industries - from those that log in a few times a month to power users that access the full features of the software on an hourly basis,” Volpato says. “So it’s vital the DAM caters for all in terms of being easy to use.”

Baker sees tremendous potential for the DAM module as a cut through product that can stand on its own. “While it’s true that it has been developed for our Brand Automation system, it’s built-in smarts and beautiful UI mean that it can be utilised as a stand-alone, cost effective DAM system for virtually anyone from individual professionals right up to global companies.”