What is Digital Asset Management Platform (better known as DAM)
DAM is a software category that basically consists of centralizing, standardizing, distributing and mainly managing digital archives so that everyone involved in industry processes such as trade marketing, customer marketing, brand development, sales, sales capabilities, project management, among others, can use always-approved, up-to-date and centralized digital assets quickly and securely.
The use of a DAM platform to manage all of your digital assets brings a lot of advantages when the industry needs to distribute all of your digital assets in a complex and capillary chain (you can read my article about this What the advantages of using digital asset management platform - DAM here) but not only advantages, there are some challenges as well.
What are the challenges of DAM
No product is perfect and totally immune to challenges. I prefer to say challenges to disadvantages since challenges can be more easily worked around than disadvantages that often require significant changes that make adoption unfeasible.
In fact a DAM platform has few challenges and, depending on the choice of its vendor, they are almost nonexistent.
Ownership and user adoption - Ownership in the sense of having a autonomous manager, taxonomy creation guidelines, platform structure organization, and access to all the numerous players in the chain. For the platform to be effective, everyone in the organization must use it to realize its full potential benefits. Once implemented, everyone should be trained to use it and rely on support. It is necessary to have someone responsible for managing the platform to give user direction and be responsible on a day to day basis.
For this it is necessary to have a platform that facilitates all these needs, in which the processes for adding new users are simple and do not bring “bottlenecks” to the tool managers; where taxonomy creation and change functionality is made fun and easy and all necessary changes are made automatically; and that access to all players in the chain be made simple using tools and technologies to which they are adapted without being required to access your DAM platform to solicit, obtain or distribute their assets.
Thus both platform management and user adoption becomes simple and no longer a challenge.
Integration - DAM systems will need to work with several other legacy systems currently in use in the organization depending on the business model, for example Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Content Management System (CMS), or Enterprise Resource Planning (ERPs). A good DAM platform enables integration with any platform within your industry structure through the use of Application Programming Interface (APIs) that communicate to the various channels and systems of your business model and exchange files and information simply and automatically. Without this you will have to switch assets between platforms manually, making them unusable for cost reasons, mainly because both asset creation and utilization will continue to grow.
Metadata - DAM platforms use metadata. However if your metadata does not conform your DAM platform will not either. You will need to organize all assets in a way that makes searching easier. Again choosing your DAM vendor impacts metadata usage and platform effectiveness as the tool should help you identify the asset, enrich it, and organize it according to the taxonomy framework you create, all automatic.
Costs - You will need to consider the maintenance costs of the DAM platform once it is installed as your organization grows and the use of assets and new players as well. Again your choice of your DAM provider has a decisive impact on these costs as the cloud-based platform reduces the cost of traffic in your network environment, enables scalability as cloud resources can easily scale as the demand and availability are requested.
Therefore, there are numerous advantages to using DAM platform and the challenges can be easily overcome by choosing a good platform provider.
Later I will make an article about the differences between DAM platform and File Storage platform.
We understand the needs of your business, the needs of all players in your supply chain, the complexity of your brand channels and communication, the advantages and challenges, and especially the differences between the two platform models (DAM and File Storage). ) It's easy to see if it's time to migrate your assets to a DAM platform that specializes in this.
Now that you have understood the advantages and challenges of digital asset management for the Industry, discover Yapoli:
Yapoli is an intelligent platform, made for governance, management and distribution of digital assets for large corporations.