Get on the Dam Bandwagon and Get Organized!

As a creative agency that produces a plethora of assets—including video and audio files, PDFs, photos and graphics, print pieces, and many others—CMD needs to stay organized. We’ve been using digital asset management, or DAM, tools at CMD for about 15 years. A few years ago, we started investigating enterprise-level DAM platforms.

DAMs are not only storage facilities for your assets, they allow you to structure and tag assets, making it much easier to search for, sort, and distribute files across the organization. They provide excellent import and export functionality, versioning and preview functions, plus thumbnail images of files to speed searches and help reduce duplication. Many DAMs can also automatically convert assets to different file types and sizes. Finally, they provide excellent security and let companies easily manage rights and permissions.

Internally, our DAM makes us more efficient and provides several benefits:

• Integration with Adobe enables designers to quickly browse, select and place files directly into InDesign.
• Account services can more easily find examples of past work to share with clients.
• The system allows easy sharing of assets with our clients, even without an account.

When CMD decided to take our asset management to the next level, we started with our largest group of assets, for JELD-WEN, which numbered almost 200,000. Uploading and organizing the files took several months, but the effort significantly streamlined processes for the creative teams creating new assets, as well as JELD-WEN associates seeking old and new assets. Now, we’ve turned our attention to helping other CMD customers with asset management.

A client who maintained a small, secure asset library in Google recently approached CMD about using a portion of the CMD DAM to set up a site to enable their clients in China to access files that were not available because of Chinese access restrictions on Google. The client wanted more bells and whistles than a simple file share site could provide, and our DAM provided the perfect solution.

Are your assets worth a DAM? You bet they are! Let CMD help you get organized.

Contact CMD to learn more.