In a time of accelerated digital transformation, the concept of digital assets is also rapidly expanding. Put simply, almost everything is a digital asset these days.
Digital Asset Management (DAM) has long been an essential tool in content-centric fields such as marketing, media and entertainment, but they’re no longer the exclusive users of rich media in day-to-day operations. The growing volume and complexity of digital content in most industries has made DAM a crucial capability in a wide variety of organizations.
Today’s companies use digital assets for everything from customer engagement and process optimization to security and quality assurance. Employees need to access the assets – images, videos, audio and more – quickly and easily, without leaving their usual workflows. This makes integration with key business systems vital in any DAM solution.
Reining in rich media
Even in fields like marketing where people have deep experience handling vast quantities of digital content, the management challenges are increasing. Keeping pace with consumer expectations means constantly creating rich, interactive omni-channel content that must be accessible, yet still meet evolving governance regulations. Then there’s the ongoing task of overseeing rights and permissions, which has a direct impact on the bottom line. When there’s no central destination for digital assets, they end up stored in multiple, unconnected repositories – upwards of 20 is typical – throughout the organization. Employees waste time and money searching for files and bringing them into the relevant business application, or duplicating them if they can’t be found.
Business leaders outside marketing and media face an especially daunting task. They’re often unaccustomed to basic management processes for digital media, yet their companies are now overflowing with it. Fragmented storage and poor accessibility drain productivity, frustrate employees, and degrade customer or partner relationships with slow content distribution and potential inconsistency.
Integrating DAM with business processes
Central management and full visibility are foundational for organizations seeking to maximize the value of their digital assets. Whether it’s a marketing team producing omni-channel content for external consumption or an engineering company creating training videos for remote employees, a DAM solution keeps everything in one place.
Having a hub for all digital content is critical, but so is integrating that hub with web content management, product information management, content delivery networks, graphic design tools and other fundamental systems. By linking digital assets with product and customer data within enterprise applications, employees can efficiently create, find, manage, distribute and reuse content.
An advanced DAM solution reduces costs and boosts productivity by eliminating time-consuming searches and duplication, automating renewal of intellectual property and enhancing consistency across channels. The content supply chain becomes transparent in the context of employees’ familiar business processes.
Just as important, good DAM solutions enable companies to control the complete lifecycle of their digital assets. Filters and security features limit access, so specific employees, partners and customers can use specific assets without making manual requests.
OpenTextTM Media Management can be a single, flexible DAM for the entire enterprise. It keeps digital assets in one highly scalable place that’s available organization-wide via headless integrations or customized, team-specific portals. OpenTextTM Digital Asset Management for SAP® Solutions extends Media Management, offering powerful SAP ecosystem integrations.
How the San Jose Sharks accelerated the creation and use of media assets
Driving fan engagement when teams are on and off the ice is integral to the success of any NHL team. The San Jose Sharks needed a DAM to better manage media for rapid creative production, particularly for the wide variety of video content fans had come to expect at games, in TV ads and on social media. Improving search capabilities was a top priority, since the production team had to package stories at the speed of social media.
The Sharks chose OpenText Digital Asset Management for SAP in part for its seamless integrations with the enterprise applications their employees use most. The integration into Adobe Premiere, the industry-standard professional video editing tool, facilitated by implementation partner Cortex Vertical, was a game-changer.
Now the production team simply drops assets into the repository with the appropriate metadata whenever they’re created. Users can find and share the files quickly when they’re working in Adobe Premiere, streamlining the production of video projects that build brand value and keep fans entertained.
DAM 3.0 in action
The new frontier of DAM is still in development, but it’s defined by next-level capabilities like these:
- Delivering insight into asset value by tracking usage and applying performance metrics
- Expanding the potential variety of assets that can be managed to include new types (3D models, security footage, drone feeds, software updates and more) and assets traditionally stored outside DAM solutions (text)
- Storing asset components (website sections and more), not just complete assets
- Offering greater integration with WCM, CCM, CRM, social media management platforms and more
SAP, one of the world’s leading producers of ERP software, chose the DAM solution it sells (SAP Digital Asset Management solution by OpenText, also known as OpenText Digital Asset Management for SAP Solutions) because it has these third-generation capabilities. Every asset type at SAP – from images and videos to white papers – that isn’t tied to a traditional ERP lives inside the DAM, which is integrated with more than 20 applications used at the organization. The solution serves more than 105,000 SAP employees in more than 140 countries, yet few are aware they’re connecting to it. No training is required, since employees stay in their regular business applications. The right assets are simply always available wherever and whenever they need them.
Managing today’s and tomorrow’s digital assets
Part of the OpenText Experience Platform, OpenText Media Management is a DAM solution for every organization. It’s much more than just a tool for marketing, offering a powerful advantage to sales, production and, increasingly, maintenance and security operations.
OpenText Digital Asset Management for SAP provides a single, secure point of management for the growing number and variety of digital assets in today’s companies. It integrates seamlessly with the core SAP solutions to increase process efficiency, control the asset lifecycle and deliver a consistent omni-channel experience.
