Images help tell a compelling story in your sales, marketing, and presentation materials. They can also be cumbersome and confusing to manage if you don’t have a good system in place.
Digital libraries for architects, engineering firms, and construction companies grow at a rapid pace as employees from different departments create and source images, videos, and illustrations.
It’s all part of keeping your firm competitive and making the best use of AEC technology that you can to stay ahead.
Without a digital management system for those assets, things get out of hand quickly when it comes to copyright infringement, wasted money, and wasted time.
What can happen?
- An employee unknowingly purchases an image your company already bought last year.
- Someone uses a “not for commercial use” or copyrighted image in your sales brochure.
- The marketing team spends hours just searching for that one image that they know you have, but they can’t find.
89% of companies waste between 0.5 to 1 full day every week just on image management.
The answer to reducing all that inefficiency is a Digital Asset Management (DAM) tool.
What is DAM?
Digital asset management (DAM) is a process in your workflow that facilitates the organization, storage, and retrieval of rich media assets. DAM also helps you manage digital rights and permissions, both of your own original assets and those you’ve purchased.
“Rich media assets” include:
- Photos
- Illustrations
- Music
- Videos
- Animations
- Gifs
- Podcasts
- And other multimedia content
Digital asset management applications give you the framework you need to manage these multimedia assets, including being able to find them based upon a keyword search, assign access permissions, and share them easily.
Two key things that DAM apps do are:
- Create and Extract Metadata:Metadata on a media asset can include keywords, artist and copyright information, client details, location, and more.
- Make it Easy to Access Your Assets: DAM tools act as a centralized place where employees can access company digital assets. It and also natively integrates with certain programs like PowerPoint or InDesign.
Examples of DAM Applications
Here are two examples of DAM applications that our AEC clients use to manage their multimedia assets.
1. Adobe Experience Manager
If you already use Adobe Creative Cloud, then this tool will fit in perfectly with the media tools you’re using.
Features include:
- Native Creative Cloud connection
- Asset automation (AI is used to tag, crop, etc.)
- Rich media delivery where you need it
2. OpenAsset (for AEC Sector)
This DAM application was designed specifically for architect, engineering, and construction companies as well as real estate firms. Because it was built for the AEC sector, it’s designed to integrate with a number of tools you may already use for project management, communication, file storage, and more.
OpenAsset allows you to:
- Streamline your workflow
- Easily store, find, use, and share digital assets
- Use AI-assisted tagging and search
- Organize assets by market sector (public, education, civil, etc.)
You’ll find several industry-minded features in this DAM tool that are designed to reduce the time it takes your team to create media-rich documents.
These include things like branded templates for InDesign, PowerPoint, and Word, and the ability to create custom image sizing specifications.
Reasons Your AEC Firm Should Use Digital Asset Management
There are several reasons that your firm should considering working with a DAM application.
Organize Your Digital Assets
You can collate all your project media in one place so you can easily reference them for tender submissions, sales materials, presentations, and more. This is especially helpful now that more final presentations are being done via Zoom – you have everything you need at your fingertips to quickly find media “on the fly.”
Cost Savings
Without a centalized strategy, assets can be saved across multiple computers, mobile devices, and cloud storage accounts and can also be easily lost.
Using a DAM application, you reduce wasted time spent locating media, stop duplicate purchases, and improve the efficiency of using digital assets in your content.
Reduce Your Risk
Well-meaning employees that don’t fully understand copyright regulations might not realize that the “perfect” bit of music they used in your company’s latest marketing video is infringing on copyright.
You can save yourself a lot of headaches by using a centralized database of all rich media assets that can act as the only resource employees are approved to use for company content generation.
Automate Imaging Activities
Companies often need to use different sizes of the same original image, which can mean time spent sizing down and cropping images manually.
DAM apps allow you to automate this process by creating templates that can be used to automatically size and optimize an image for every different iteration you need.
Use Cloud or On-Premises
OpenAsset gives you the choice of using their DAM application in a cloud environment or maintaining complete control and using it with a local area network on-premises.
Get a Handle on Your Digital Asset Management Today!
How much time is your company spending keeping track of your media assets?
Netcare can introduce you to a better solution and help you put a DAM workflow into place to save money and improve efficiency.
Contact us today to schedule a consultation. Call (02) 9114 9920 or .