Challenges of a Manual Process
As a European leader in office equipment, school material and stationery supplies, Adveo is a company that knows all about the need to maintain efficiency & quality while coordinating many moving parts. It recently became clear that they needed the same qualities from a packaging management solution.
With locations in seven countries and distribution in nine, Adveo has one of the largest catalogs in the industry, which
includes office supplies and a wide range of complementary products such as furniture, facility management, and support services. Their growth in recent years has been impressive, but it has come with its own set of challenges.
“A major part of our growth has been through acquisitions, with many different brands and
processes in different countries,” explained Rosa Carvalho, Own Brands Marketing Director at Adveo. “As a result, we were trying to manage our packaging design and management process with a range of different systems. We were relying on manual, cumbersome processes such as email and file-sharing for the management of review and approvals. Not only was this inefficient, it was also very open to error and lack of version control. We urgently needed a single, comprehensive tool that could manage all of this for us with a standardized process.”
A Solution to Support Continuous Growth
Adveo knew they needed to find a solution that would enable them to centralize
branding development, including packaging tasks and processes, and create a common execution process that was more profes-
sional and efficient.
“We knew that finding a solution was vital to
support the company’s continued growth,” said Carvalho. “It had to achieve several important things for us: to standardize all our processes, better align the corporate and regional locations, achieve brand and packaging consistency, free up resources, and end unnecessary duplication of efforts.
After conducting the necessary research, it soon became clear that WebCenter QuickStart for Brands from Esko ticked all the boxes.”
This integration gives us total flexibility in our supply to customers and the capability to respond quickly to changing customer needs. We’ve seen significant growth in short run and fast turnaround demands as retail competitiveness intensifies.
Up and Running Quickly
As its names suggests, QuickStart gets organizations up and running quickly, starting with best-in-class workflows built in and ready to use, with clear tasks and designated ownership for new products and artwork creation as well as reworks of existing artworks.
With this software, Brand Owners have the ability to centralize data and artwork and any other related documents, with an asset browser to search, review and repurpose with ease and speed.
There are best practice workflows. There are simple but powerful 2D and 3D review and approval tools, which offer valuable functionality like file-to-file comparisons, digital annotation tools and approval and rejections with a digital signature.
“We now have a single, online platform that allows all relevant stakeholders to access the packaging process from wherever they are,” said Carvalho. “Even better, the platform was partially configured with work-flow and processes based on industry best practices, and we were also able to configure elements of it to fit our specific needs quickly and cost effectively.”
Benefits From the Get-go
With WebCenter now well established at Adveo, the benefits have been clear, particularly in terms of consolidation of efforts.
No longer is one person looking through lots of emails and Excel spreadsheets to get the correct information for packaging design – it is now all contained in one “single source of truth.” Additionally, stakeholders now review and approve packaging artwork using WebCenter, and if they’re late, the system reminds them!
Intuitive System Roll-out
While there were a few tweaks to be made once the system was rolled out, training was smooth – users viewed the provided training videos and used a conference call to ask any outstanding questions.
“The system is very intuitive,” said Carvalho. “It is easy to understand, and now everyone is on the same page. Thanks to WebCenter QuickStart, we have what we wanted – a single, clear packaging process, where everybody knows their role and what they’re supposed to do!”
