Did you ever want a quick list of general DAM benefits? Here’s our list of the Top 5 DAM benefits.
We all have digital photos and other assets like PDFs, Word docs, videos, graphics and more on our laptops or phones or tablets, and we do just fine as individuals organizing our the corporate files we create (well, sometimes…). So why does our company need a DAM?
The basic role of a DAM is to solve chaos. In general, you can do a decent job organizing 10,000 photos, give or take, in a folder structure run by a desktop application. After all, that just represents a couple hundred folders, each with 50 photos. So maybe you have some structure by date, and you are pretty sure you remember when things happened, so finding that photo you need for the website feels reasonably achievable. If a file is not in your system you can ask Harry or Debby, who may have it on their hard drives, or maybe they are better than you are at remembering dates.
In our long experience, once you get to about 10,000 images things break down. The institutional memory of when things happened gets fuzzy. Debby gets transferred and Harry retires, and there go their photos. Your desktop system slows down. Maybe your hard drive has an issue and your backup isn’t so good…… Right when your management needs a lot of specific photos, of course!
Top 5 DAM Benefits:
Save Time: A DAM, being database driven, “remembers” a lot more than just the date some event happened, it knows who was in the photos, where they were, and the product number of that widget you need, so the time savings are obvious and the dependence on institutional knowledge goes way down. Also, being a single system, EVERY asset is in one place so no more being stuck because the photo is on Harry’s laptop and he is traveling today.
Save money: if you cannot find the asset you are looking for, what choice do you have but to pay to have it recreated? How long will arranging that take you and what will it cost?
Centralization: what is the value to your organization to have all you digital assets in one place and accessible? If you need to send the same logo file to your offices around the world, how useful is it to have all your stuff in one place?
Consistent branding: what if you had a system that made the old logo inaccessible and only allowed user access to the newest revision?
Collaboration and communications: One of the most consistent challenges to any company today is internal communications. A DAM cannot force Sally and Bill to talk to each other, but when it comes to your digital assets, a good DAM which allow users to add comments CAN make sure everyone on the project team is on the same page when it comes to the collateral for that new project.