Effective Content Management Is a Must

It’s no secret that managing control of your content – whether it’s data, images, barcodes, and phrases –used in labeling and packaging artwork – is critical to ensuring compliance and enforcing brand consistency.

Is your company facing challenges with content used in labeling and product packaging? Labeling data can be sourced from a range of systems, custom-built applications, regulatory databases, and extraneous spreadsheets. This means that to get the right content you must access multiple sources of data to track down and locate the required content. This process of search and locate can becomes strenuous, time consuming and costly – even impacting time to market. Now, imagine if your company could store, manage and access all of its content for labeling and packaging artwork from one common, centralized and easily accessible location. Centralizing this data would result in enhanced accuracy and consistency with easy access to the most up-to-date version of labels or artwork. No more search and locate needed.

One best practice for ensuring accurate sourcing of data is to integrate labeling and artwork with business applications so you can leverage existing business processes and vital data sources without any redundancies. When you integrate your labeling with your business applications you also have the ability to provide controlled access to select users, who can update the most complex labels and artwork in minutes as opposed to weeks or months. This all streamlines creation, review and approvals of artwork to reduce costs and eliminate risks.

But how can you handle the increasing amount of content required for labeling and packaging artwork? With so many moving parts and the increased focus on changing customer and regulatory requirements, it’s critical to be able to easily mange variable data on your label. Now, think about the many stakeholders involved in the process, from content creators and design team, to legal affairs and regulatory teams, as well as external suppliers – each member plays an important role. By leveraging advanced, configurable workflows and a centralized digital content library, different internal and external stakeholders can review and manage relevant labeling data, images, and templates in real time. Put an end to duplicate content, and stop re-labeling boxes by ensuring the right people have access to the right content at the right time. Each stakeholder has their own interests and requirements that must be appropriately represented on the label and artwork. Why not introduce a more efficient, streamlined approach towards making label changes?

With all of the challenges and concerns listed above, it’s no surprise that during a recent Loftware survey, respondents reported that content management is more critical than ever. After surveying nearly 1,000 professionals from organizations across all major industries and 55 countries – our results showed that 80% highlighted their concern about having incorrect or inaccurate content on their labels. Additionally, 70% believe integration to existing business applications is becoming more important for content, data and image management and 67% of respondents reported that extending labeling to partners and suppliers would enable them to avoid any re-labeling.

To find out more about the importance of content management and to uncover the rest of this year’s trends – check out Loftware’s 2020 Top 5 Trends in Labeling and Packaging Artwork Report.