On 23 May, the second event of Digital Circles, the round table format that opens the door to digitisation dialogues with IT partners and customers from various sectors, such as fashion, furniture and manufacturing, was staged.
“Arrive earlier, arrive better. Make B2B and B2C customers happy with DAM and PIM” was the name of the event that shed light on the time-to-market impacts of Digital Asset Management and Product Information Management solutions.
Here are a few notes we took between the speeches.
According to Federico Venturoli, CEO of Glam – an IT partner specialising in the design and development of e-commerce for prestigious brands – the scenario surrounding businesses is complex and changing.
After the caesura marked by the pandemic and the consequent rush to marketplaces to shore up shop closures, awareness of the key role of proprietary channels has grown among many brands.
E-commerce, in fact, not only guarantees higher margins, but also allows companies to tailor commercial and marketing strategies in detail.
The multiplicity of business channels, in turn, has consolidated the need for omnichannel strategies, which, in turn, has resulted in the need for governance of the entire supply chain for the production, management and distribution of content and product information.
One of the most frequent doubts when approaching digitisation concerns the choice between a single vendor solution or the creation of modular systems by aggregating different tools.
Federico Venturoli clarified that there is no right choice regardless.
On the one hand, adopting a monolithic approach saves money compared to a modular one, which is by nature characterised by significantly higher levels of potential and flexibility.
How to choose? According to Glam’s CEO, it is necessary to be clear about the needs that drive digitisation. Can the company satisfy its needs by making do with standard functionalities or does it need ad hoc flows?
Also keep an eye on the teams: a modular system – precisely because it is tailored to the company’s needs – requires a dose of awareness and internal skills that enrich the work of partners and IT vendors.
The second guest on the first panel of Digital Circles II was Giuseppe Bucello, Head of Business Unit at Skylabs. There were two contributions that we noted during his talk.
The first: according to his experience, DAM and PIM reduce collaboration times within and between teams involved in the production, processing and management of digital assets and product data such as marketing, design and sales by up to 25%.
This figure is set to rise with the increasing use of AI.
The second cue, came in response to a question from the audience: how to explain to business the need for DAM and PIM and their solid dialogue?
Bucello – together with Venturoli – concluded the panel by emphasising the importance of understanding the management you have in front of you, explaining to them that together DAM and PIM reduce costs and increase margins, enabling brand control.
In a nutshell, a DAM+PIM is an investment that pays for itself very quickly.
“Bringing order and making the company’s information assets accessible to the entire organisation, starting with digital assets“.
These are the words with which Carlo Carraro, Web & Digital Content Specialist, begins to narrate the digital journey of Arper, national design excellence, at the opening of the second panel ‘Echoes of Success’.
A digitalisation flow that in a short time was extended to product information, defining a data model that was the starting point for enriching shots and videos with data such as photographers, architects, cities.
When asked what was the most obvious impact on time to market, Carraro has no doubts and answers with three words: Salone del Mobile.
Those in the industry won’t be reading anything new: an event like the Salone requires months of work.
In the specific case of Arper, THRON PLATFORM proved fundamental in classifying information and content and distributing it in a differentiated manner according to target and reference market (ITA/USA).
Among the platform’s most appreciated features are versioning, which allows a content to be updated in real time on one or all channels, and tagging, which allows each channel to be enriched with information related to the product it represents.
According to Carlo, these two features, in addition to THRON’s DAM + PIM + Media Delivery approach, have proven to be strategic in ensuring “…a seamless experience and allowing the company to arrive on time for the most important trade show of the year“.
Vincenzo La Braca, IT E-Commerce & Omnichannel Manager at Geox, traced the digital path of the famous brand. A path that was consolidated starting from the need to reduce the costs of managing multiple catalogues on multiple channels.
Today Geox with THRON has a platform that incorporates multiple tools: DAM software, PIM software and media delivery, and has also digitised the approval flows, including those relating to product shots.
Digitisation has made it possible to reduce the time and cost of generating content, enhance collaboration between different teams and, above all, encourage the reuse of assets.
Recycling assets that have already been produced and approved for certain purposes and/or channels in order to reuse them for others has proved fundamental to the ROI of Geox’s digital assets, which can quickly retrieve content created for e-commerce or marketplaces and reuse it, for example, for phygital purposes (outlets and stores).
This was announced in the finale by Claudio Tonti, Head of Products, Digital Strategy and R&D at Websolute, the protagonist of the first edition of Digital Circles.
The buzzing artificial intelligence trends do not lie: AI is here to stay (and become more and more established).
Returning to DAM and PIM, in recent years we have learnt to organise content and product information, tagging, sharing and distributing corporate information assets.
According to Tonti, we have shaped real hubs of assets and data. Today, it is time to go one step further.
AI allows us to analyse this mine of value and extract knowledge from it to alleviate manual labour and capitalise on the time and knowledge invested in producing the information assets.
How to do this, we will discuss in the webinar we are already organising together with Websolute.
That’s all for this date. But Digital Circles will be back soon.
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