Digital Asset Management tools have been around for a while, but are still an area which is not widely known to the mainstream of small or medium enterprises.

In simple terms, Digital Asset Management Tools (frequently also referred to as DAM), can be understood as a central repository of all your digital documents – not limited to pictures, they can contain also videos, presentations, offers for your customers or templates for the new pen with your company logo on it.

Assets will be uploaded including meta or qualifaication data and a responsible owner. With the build in search, you will no longer need to search for your assets. You will be finding them, when needed. A built-in user management and granular authorization setup, will ensure, that only the authorized employees are using the correct assets.

But the tools go far beyond being a simple centralized storage; they simplify the everyday life of your marketing department and increase the productivity of your teams. Many of todays´ manual activities requiring a lot of time of different people can be automatized or at least digitalized.

Here are just real-life examples of how DAM can optimize your daily work:
Cooperation with an external partner to create digital assets – like the nice new picture needed for your website

When working with a digital agency, the cooperation can quickly lead to organizational challegenges: The design agency sends their proposals via email, Dropbox, USB drive or some other ways to the single employees involved in the process. These employees take the proposals, work on them locally, maybe even share them among each other via email for further fine-tuning and eventually send the feedback to the agency.  

Some risks of this approach

Imagine that the colleague who receives the images from the agency is in a workshop for a few days and so the email goes unnoticed. Well, at the same time, some other people might be waiting for these images to continue their work. If they are proactive, they will clarify this with the agency. The result is additional time investment for the clarification loop.

Eventually, as the time passes, nobody really knows what is the current version of the file or where it is located. Time has to be invested to find the right or at least the last available version.

Maybe it is only stored on the local disk of the user PC, which just crashed? Efforts on checking backups or re-acquiring the data from the agency will be invested.

There is no tracking of who has ever used the image; especially for highly qualitative images the licenses are frequently time limited and thus you run the risk, that your employees will use the image also after the license expiration.  And your company is due to pay a fine…

How can DAM help you in this case?

The data exchange is done centrally on the DAM platform. This allows for a quick and simple collaboration with both external and internal users always ensuring that the communication and versioning is well tracked and traceable also in the future – unlike an email conversation of an employee who left your company 2 years ago…

This central platform is backed-up and prepared for fallback scenarios.

DAM tools offer a warning being sent to all „consumers“ of an asset in case of license expiration.

This way, you minimize the risk, that you break the license condition and protect yourself against possible legal actions.