You’ve been working for weeks on a label change, and the launch date is next week. It took forever to track down the marketing, regulatory, and legal stakeholders for a “final” approval. Then… you’re asked to re-send the label to the marketing team for “one last review.”
The marketing team requests several new changes, and you know that after you make these changes, you’ll have to send the label back to the regulatory and legal teams for another review – in turn delaying the launch.
You’re Not Alone
If you often find yourself in similar label and packaging artwork “approval pickles,” you’re in good company.
Manufacturers and brands of all sizes and across a wide variety of industries report one of their biggest challenges is label and packaging artwork approvals.
Why?
Many teams rely heavily on email and even IM to communicate.
And while email and IM have numerous benefits, the truth is they hurt more than they help the label and packaging artwork approval process:
- Searching through email threads and IM chats to track down label and packaging artwork approvals is tedious and disorganized.
- Understanding who needs to approve what can be unclear.
- When deadlines are provided in an email, there’s no automated way to remind someone an approval is due. You’re reliant on the packaging owner to track approvals and due dates, and to remind stakeholders manually when they need to review an asset.
In the end, you have unhappy stakeholders, and you’re tasked with last-minute edits, both of which can derail your project’s success.
Ban Approval Processes from Email and Instant Message
Thoughtful teams instead remove approval processes from email and instant messengers and place them into an automated workflow management solution.
Assigning approval tasks with due dates in a workflow management solution gives stakeholders visibility into the approval timeline, and it notifies the approver when a deadline is on the horizon. This high degree of visibility and “touch free” notification in turn yield significant benefits.
This time savings adds up to quite a bit in the long run, providing companies with the momentum to move on to new projects consistently. And with more new projects underway, employees’ workdays become more interesting and productive, improving overall morale.
The icing on the cake: when an employee gets involved in more tasks that generate the most revenue for your business in the same working hours, it leads to more productivity… and more productivity means saving more money for your organization!
Also important: a workflow management solution lessens the demand on your management team to oversee routine operational issues such as approvals – the workflow system itself acts as your “hall monitor,” alerting your management team of issues rather than requiring their constant vigilance.
Reducing time spent on routine activities means your management team now has more time available for key strategy and growth initiatives within the organization.
Finally, a workflow management solution records each action that takes place on the platform.
This means you know who performed what action and when – providing a permanent, unchangeable record to rely upon in the event of a critical issue such as a product recall.
Alongside the functional attributes, an automated workflow management solution can also demonstrate that all the right people have been involved during reviews, adjustments, and approvals to ensure preparedness for an internal or external audit.
Automate Your Approvals
An automated workflow management solution eliminates the challenges associated with managing approval processes from the inbox or chat room. It’s easy to implement and generates a rapid return on investment. Employees save time; companies save money; overall morale improves; processes are auditable and compliant; and speed to market improves.
