Example Digital Asset Management scenario

Whenever you are in the market for buying a Digital Asset Management or Brand Management system – or indeed any other software system come to think of it – we would always advocate for you to write down the top 3-5 real-life scenarios/use cases that you need covered really well.

If you do this as part of your RFP process then you will be doing yourself a big favour because the system you end up buying will be really good at what you mainly need it for.

Why? Because the typical alternative is to create a long list of feature requirements in a spreadsheet and then ask the shortlisted vendors if they support each one or not, but this does not give you much information about how they support it and whether this fits into your workflows.

Also, if you write down your top scenarios, you can then also ask your shortlisted vendors to demo exactly those scenarios instead of them giving you a canned demo which will of course look very slick, but not necessarily demonstrate that the system will be good for you.

This will by the way also benefit the vendor because if a vendor wins a job but the system doesn’t cover the needed functionality in the way that the client imagined it, then this is generally speaking not a win-win relationship.

The below example outlines a scenario for an imaginary company which does a significant amount of photography and video commissioning – a typical DAM use case for companies with a wide product range.

Photo Commissioning

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Beatrix: Creative Director

Bill: Creative Studio production manager

Steve: CMO

Susan: Image and video coordinator

Annie, Bruce, Mario: Freelance photographers

Ken: Website manager

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Beatrix writes and uploads a creative brief for the next photo or video shoot, and will also select a preference for whether she thinks they should commission Annie, Bruce or Mario for the job.

Bill will then add the technical/production requirements for the job such as deadline, job number, product SKU, product name, etc. If it’s a video job then the specific detail needed is different to a  photo shoot so he will need to be prompted for different info depending on the job type.

Steve will then need to approve the brief, and indeed if he doesn’t approve it then Beatrix and/or Bill will have to make tweaks to the brief.

Once the brief and production details have been approved, Susan will then commission Annie, Bruce or Mario to do the job and will coordinate the photoshoot with them (offline to the system).

If any models are booked for the shoot, then Susan will also arrange for them to sign model release forms which ultimately need to be uploaded and linked to the finished images/videos.

In this case Annie got commissioned for the job and once the shoot is complete she will edit down the images so that only 20 of the best photos are uploaded to the system.

Beatrix and Bill will then look through the uploaded photos and approve only the ones they want to actually be used, but the deselected ones should still stay in the system until the final selection has been made.

Steve then looks though the selected images, and has the opportunity to tweak the final selection.
Once the final selection is made, the trail of events, approvals and all other info related to the project going back to the briefing stage should be linked to these images.

Annie or Bill’s team may then also need to do some final retouching on the selected images and upload final, retouched versions.

Susan will add final tagging to the selected images – some of which will come from Bill’s info entered earlier – and publish the images on the DAM system so they are available to a wider group of people.

The Brandworkz team

Bill’s team need the selected images available for insertion into various layouts in Adobe InDesign.

Ken also need access to them to use on the eCommerce website.

The sales team and various other parties around the business and externally will need to be informed that approved pictures are now available for the product and they need to be able to download them for a variety of ad-hoc needs.

Finally, on an ad-hoc basis both Susan and Steve need to be able to track where – and by whom – the images are being used.