How to Seamlessly Integrate Packaging Automation with Existing Systems

Introduction

Integrating packaging artwork automation with existing systems is critical to enhancing operational efficiency, ensuring automatic data transfer between systems, and minimizing manual efforts and errors. 

Robust integration ensures that all teams—such as marketing, compliance, and production—work with the most current and accurate version of packaging artwork, facilitating better collaboration and alignment. By streamlining complex workflows and ensuring a unified repository of artwork copy, organizations can ensure faster approvals and quicker time-to-market.

Introduction to the Importance of Integration

Integrating packaging artwork automation with existing systems is critical to enhancing collaboration, ensuring seamless data flow, and eliminating the need to key in data already available in other systems. With proper integration, organizations 

• Synchronize artwork-related data across departments and external partners in real-time, fostering better communication and collaboration and ensuring everyone works with the latest artwork copy. 

• Eliminate manual data entry across multiple systems, reducing the time (and costs) to design, approve, and release artwork and bringing high-quality products to the market.  

• Simplify data flow by creating seamless connections between design, production, and approval processes, eliminating data silos, and ensuring stakeholders are aligned and working with the same version of artwork. 

• Reduce errors and risks of using outdated or incorrect artwork by ensuring all systems and stakeholders work on approved artwork copies, thus minimizing delays, reworks, and recalls.  

Understanding the Various Integrations

‍Understanding the Various Integrations 

The packaging artwork lifecycle is long and complex, with several players and systems in the ecosystem. Unlocking excellence and going live faster requires organizations to stop operating in silos and start building a unified packaging artwork ecosystem. This is possible only when all the tools and systems within the businesses are properly and continuously integrated. 

Let’s look at some of these integrations that are key to enabling better collaboration, driving efficiency, and helping you get to market faster.

• Product codes: Integrating packaging artwork automation with the ERP system can help pull the relevant codes available within the ERP. Teams can reuse these codes within their packaging artwork automation system to track and manage products, maintain brand consistency, and ensure compliance. 

• Packaging and labeling inventory: Packaging designs are updated every 12-18 months in the CPG industry. Failure to check the inventory level of existing labels before ordering the print for the new artwork design often leads to discarded printed packaging material. Integrating artwork automation with packaging and labeling inventory can help provide much-needed insight into the current label inventory. This enables teams to make decisions related to launch date and existing inventory use, preventing wastage. 

• Vendor POs: When print vendor purchase orders are released from an ERP system, vendors must provide proofs and printed material. Integrating the ERP system with the artwork approval process guarantees that the final approved artwork reaches the vendor on time, minimizing delays and disruptions and alleviating stress for everyone involved.

• PLM: When new products are introduced, the PLM system records crucial product information like ingredients, nutrition facts, allergens, etc. Robust integration can enable the packaging artwork automation system to pull this data from the PLM and reuse it. This can help centralize data, streamline workflows, and improve team collaboration, ensuring a single source of truth for artwork assets.

• PIM: Once the pack copy is approved and artwork designed, PIM integration ensures vital copy information is transmitted to PIM systems. This enables online retailers and the broader company ecosystem to access accurate and up-to-date artwork, minimizing errors and the time spent on revisions. Additionally, PIM integration helps maintain compliance with branding guidelines and regulatory requirements by offering a complete view of all assets, ultimately enhancing the speed and effectiveness of product launches.

• QMS: Quality is crucial in the packaging artwork lifecycle. Integrating with Quality Management Systems (QMS) allows artwork revisions initiated through QMS to automatically trigger a change process within the packaging artwork automation system. This integration facilitates the efficient sharing of change control numbers and other vital details between the systems. Additionally, it minimizes errors and accelerates the approval process, ultimately enhancing overall artwork quality, customer satisfaction, and brand loyalty.

• eCommerce: By integrating packaging artwork automation with eCommerce systems, product updates can be automatically synchronized across all platforms, allowing for data export in any desired format. Such integration helps ensure that product data is accurate and up to date, leading to increased sales and reduced risk. 

Streamlining Integration of Packaging Artwork Automation with Existing Systems

Integrating packaging artwork with existing Line of Business (LOB) applications is essential for achieving operational excellence. If you want to enable seamless integration across your PLM, ERP, QMS, and PIM systems and establish real-time, accurate data flows effortlessly, here are some tips to embrace: 

• Assess the current IT landscape to thoroughly understand the different systems within your business and how they will interface with the packaging artwork automation system.

• Identify integration gaps and challenges early on and take necessary action to overcome hurdles, such as data silos, legacy systems, resource constraints, etc. 

• Define clear goals for automation while prioritizing objectives, defining success metrics, documenting processes, and communicating clearly.

• Choose the right automation tools to streamline digital asset management and offer a single source of truth for all packaging-related decisions – thus getting to print faster. 

• Invest in APIs and add-ons to plug and play and extend the packaging artwork automation system to other tools and systems integrated into the ecosystem as business needs grow. 

• Ensure data quality and consistency across the packaging artwork lifecycle to deliver high-quality packaging and maintain brand reputation and compliance. 

• Enable change management and audit trails to track and ensure all changes made to packaging content and artwork review follow a structured approach, minimize resistance among employees, and ensure transparency and accountability. ‍

• Train users on how best to leverage the integrated ecosystem of multiple tools and address concerns as they arise. 

• Monitor the performance of integrated systems, track data flow, and identify bottlenecks in time to maintain high operational efficiency. 

Transform Integration with ManageArtworks

ManageArtworks connects all stakeholders into an automated workflow, empowering them with modern proofing and approval tools. Integrating seamlessly with ERP, PIM, PLM, and QMS systems, ManageArtworks offers end-to-end visibility and transparency into the artwork management lifecycle. Additionally, real-time approval request tracking, audit trails, and dashboards allow companies to release error-free packaging artwork consistently with minimal effort.

Are you ready to transform packaging artwork management? Contact our experts to get started today!