Producing good quality digital assets, whether this is photographs, graphics, or videos, can be incredibly costly. From expensive photo & video shoots to the costs of a graphic designer or animator, once you’ve invested in creating great content you want to ensure it has a long lifecycle to maximise your ROI.

Being able to realise & maximise the value of your assets is one of the primary aims of Digital Asset Management.

Once you’ve implemented your DAM solution, rolled it out across your organisation, and increased engagement, you’ll see how it can become more central to your workflows: enabling greater benefits and cost savings compared to basic cloud storage solutions. However, as your organisation grows and changes there are often changes in your requirements. We recommend that every couple of years, if not more regularly, you should re-visit the configuration of your existing system, evaluate if you are achieving the full benefits of your investment in DAM and still maximising the value of those all-important digital assets.

Reviewing and overhauling a large DAM can be a daunting task, so we often recommend our Healthcheck package as a manageable way to start these projects.

Dependent on the size of your organisation this initial package of consultancy is often only able to address some key areas, and so it may be that from the initial Healthcheck a wide range of other recommended changes are identified. Our professional services team is here to support you in identifying where you might need to make changes and how to realise the full potential of the system.

How we can help

The first questions people often ask us when discussing a project are:

"How do I know there's a problem with my existing setup?"
&
"How much will it cost me to achieve the results I am looking for?"

Answering these questions requires some degree of consideration and investigation: in this article, we cover some key questions and ideas that will help you to answer these questions for yourself and some of the ways we will estimate overall project costs during our initial work with you.

Some of the indicators that a bespoke consultancy project is needed:

• It's difficult to find specific assets when using the search function - often this gets harder over time.
• Your assets have inconsistent metadata, where generic or out-of-date attributes are used to capture information without making it clear what should be saved.
• You’re finding that controlling user access is complex and giving each user relevant access is either time consuming or impossible, which often results in many users being given broad access for simplicity.
• New contractual or legislative changes such as GDPR mean that you need to change the way you handle, store, and process your assets and consent forms.
• You feel you’re losing control over what files are loaded into the DAM and the quality of metadata entered
• Your existing DAM solution is hosted on an old server by your IT team, resulting in a slow experience with out of date software.

Some of the solutions that we can deliver to help solve these issues:

• We can work with you to review your existing metadata, including removing duplicate values, splitting cluttered attributes into separate distinct attributes, and ease-of-use improvements.
• Review your existing users, archiving/deleting them as needed, and updating group mappings for active users.
• Configure automated rules or workflows, enabling notification messages for completed tasks or upcoming expiration dates.
• Migrate your existing Asset Bank from a self-hosted environment to the Asset Bank Cloud, enabling a range of new features that are only available to these users
• Simplify your system configuration by merging multiple hierarchical structures ('categories' and 'access levels') into a single combined Folder structure
• Implement Organisational Units or multiple sets of branding, giving more control to different teams or regions alongside a customised look and feel

Some of the factors that will have an effect on the number of consultancy hours assigned to your project, along with some example indicators to help you gauge the size of your project:

Factor	Small	Medium	Large
Number of assets	Up to 5,000	Up to 50,000	50,000+
Number of users	2 - 50	50 - 200	200+
Number of groups	2 - 5	5 - 10	10+
Number of custom attributes	0 - 5	5 - 10	10+
Number of asset types	1	2 - 5	5+

Working with you to deliver the project

The approach needed in order to effectively deliver your project will vary considerably depending on the size of your existing system and the scope of the proposed changes. Whilst every project is unique, we have pulled together some example values to give you an idea of timelines involved:

Size	Small	Medium	Large
Review your system, identify and confirm proposed changes plus priority	2 hours	4 hours	6 hours
Deliver initial proof of concept to see how the finished solution could work	2 hours	4 hours	6 hours
Complete proposed changes, such as:  - Review and re-configure existing attributes  - Implement new Folder structure  - Update user configuration and permissions	6 hours	12 hours	16 hours
Associated data manipulation and validation	2 hours	4 hours	6 hours
Creation of relevant documentation	1 hour	2 hours	4 hours
Go-live support and training material creation	3 hours	4 hours	6 hours
Project Management support	n/a	2 hours	4 hours
Total Estimate	16 hours (2 days)	32 hours (4 days)	48 hours (6 days)

Please note these numbers are not necessarily indicative of your project, as they are all unique. Get in touch with our team and we will work with you to create a customised proposal. Training courses are a separate product to a consultancy project, but they can be added to your project if required.

Working with your consultant

Throughout the duration of your project, you are assigned a dedicated consultant who will work with you throughout the entirety of the project, calling other members of our technical support and professional services team into the conversation where their expertise is relevant.

In the above table, and generally in our communications with you, we typically provide quotes on an hourly or daily basis depending on the size of the task. This invoiced time doesn't necessarily equate to calendar days as we will only bill for the time specifically spent working on your project. This means that a project with a '2-day' budget could be delivered over the course of a month, depending on what is most suitable for you.

Ready to get started?

The best way to get in touch is by initially contacting our support team who will be able to answer any initial queries you have as well as passing you to the relevant account manager to discuss larger projects where relevant.