For your business to adapt (or pivot) as market forces demand, you must be able to change your processes quickly. Your core systems generally stay intact, but how you use those core systems might need adjusting. You may also need to adjust how those systems interact with each other or with external systems.
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From chaos to clarity: How to define your content production process
With digital channels becoming the key platform to reach your target audience, creating high-quality content for omnichannel content delivery is more important than ever. Yet, managing content across these channels is challenging, especially without transparency and a centralised, overarching view of all the content at that stage.
Many content teams struggle with disjointed and chaotic processes. Different teams and individuals might work in isolation, using various tools and methods and lacking clear roles, responsibilities, and communication channels — the result is duplicated efforts, inconsistent quality, misaligned messaging, and wasted resources.
What’s the solution to problems like these? You need a transparent and standardised approach to content creation, distribution, and measurement to streamline workflows, improve collaboration, enhance relevance, and ultimately drive better results for your business.
Think for a moment about how you go about shopping online. You likely analyse product images and rely on descriptions to gain a clear understanding of the brand and product you might want to purchase. If you visit two e-commerce sites to compare prices, you might have noticed that occasionally the same branded product has different images on different e-commerce sites, and perhaps the product description is different too, or there is more information. One site might also contain more supporting content, such as ‘How to use guides’ or technical manuals, and others don’t.
What are the benefits of Product Content Management for Manufacturing?
A recent Deloitte report listed ‘Investing in advanced technologies to help mitigate risk’ as a key priority for the US manufacturing industry. Though this insight came from the US market, case studies from WoodWing have also revealed that European manufacturers have focused on digitalisation in recent years. As such, this priority should also be a key focus for the APAC region's manufacturing sector.
When it comes to reducing business costs, many people think of it as a cost-cutting exercise. While this approach has validity, it does not always yield the best results; making the wrong cuts could seriously damage your operations and the customer experience. Instead, I encourage you to think about cost reduction as an opportunity to optimise costs. Consider how you can get more from what you already have and find areas to optimise operations to reduce unnecessary costs.
Data integration provides numerous opportunities to reduce expenses across your business while enhancing your operations. It can maximise ROI, eliminate redundant data entry work and provide you with an opportunity to take advantage of cloud platforms.
Rather than grappling with multiple systems, you can reduce costs with a single source of truth for your data, ensuring that you work with accurate, up-to-date information.
Whether a customer makes a purchase relies heavily on the product content. Images and descriptions without ample information can make people second guess their decision and may result in them not proceeding with the sale.
When shopping, we can often choose from different options for a particular product. A phone case might come in ten different colours, or a pair of shoes might have three designs; marketers must account for all this content and ensure its consistency. They also have the difficult job of not only ensuring consistency but enriching it to suit the channel or campaign.
The digital content supply chain is a process that connects product content across its lifecycle and eases distribution. It starts upstream with digital assets created by manufacturers and other primary content creators. These digital assets must then be sent downstream and stored in a repository for retailers and distribution partners. These companies can then enrich the content to suit each channel, overlay it with campaign-specific content, and publish it for consumers to view in print or digital media.
A Product Content Management (PCM) platform supports the digital content supply chain in the following ways:
We can describe data integration in multiple ways and apply it to many situations, so let’s begin by looking at a couple of definitions…
Reduce error rates and improve accuracy with integration of processes
Manual data entry across siloed systems drags down efficiency and accuracy in your organisation. Mundanity and repetition breeds mistakes as staff become disengaged with their work.
Traditional business models have relied on monthly, quarterly, or yearly planning to set strategic goals and define the next steps. Today, we live in a world where technology continues evolving, and customer expectations keep changing along with the market.
Gone are the days of five-year plans. The pace of disruption has reached an intensity such that any business model today could be unviable in five years.
An agile business plan is the key to success. You must be able to pivot quickly and make changes on the fly to stay ahead of the competition. One way to achieve this agility is through systems integration. Integrated systems bring together the data you need to make informed business decisions and find cut-through in the market.
Make the right business moves with a systems integration strategy
The success of your business relies on your ability to make the right strategic bets. It feels like a tenuous line to walk with failure one wrong decision away. So how can you increase your chances of making the right decisions and ensuring you do not steer your company in the wrong direction?