'Creative Workflow Management' Drives Efficiencies in Branding and Packaging Production

NEW YORK—July 13, 2009—Intense time-to-market pressures, tightened production budgets and high regulatory hurdles are all conspiring to make things difficult for creative teams linked to the brand management, packaging and marketing functions.

But a new approach, leveraging both technology and process management, has emerged that offers the potential to drive substantial value throughout the creative production process, harmonizing the day-today work of brand execution with upstream “product lifecycle management” (PLM) efforts focused on organizational efficiency. That’s the finding of a new white paper released this morning by Winterberry Group, a leading New York-based strategic consulting firm serving the advertising and marketing industries.

Sponsored by Kodak, the white paper, entitled "Creative Workflow Management: Bringing Science to the Art of Brand Execution," explores the very significant opportunities now emerging around creative workflow management (CWM)—the dedicated set of tools and processes designed to optimize the development of creative elements and associated data through the product development cycle.

The paper explores both the leading drivers of CWM adoption, as well as the factors that are expected to support continued expansion of the practice—especially in conjunction with the PLM approach—over the coming years. Among other findings, it concludes that: