ODIN is SBT’s user-friendly brand and product lifecycle management technology that optimises speed to market and delivers real savings within the packaging arena. The browser-based framework is made up of a series of modules, including ODIN Assets, which help brand owners manage digital files in a timely and efficient manner.
All FMCG brand owners are wary of the number of digital files that are produced during the development of a new product. They take a significant amount of time to create and come at significant cost to brands. And what’s more, managing the huge database of files collated over a period of time is an extremely difficult exercise. When marketing products, ODIN Assets allows brand managers to re-use material, such as photography, logos and advertisements, in a quick and cost-effective way.
ODIN Assets is an advanced centralised library of a brand’s digital data made up of its brand guidelines, photographs, documents, audio, video and graphics. The solution offers brand owners a number of benefits such as improved brand consistency, one central source for all digital assets, easy re-use by the business locally and globally, improved efficiencies in NPD and savings on localised variant graphic production costs.
How does it work?
The solution is built on a state-of-the-art database which provides a platform to manage the assets / digital files in a highly structured secure environment. Each file within the store has its own characteristics and allows the system administrator to define permissions based upon these characteristics to users and groups of users. For example, a particular user may only have the rights to graphics within a certain brand and category. For the brand owner this means that he can control how information can be accessed with confidence and complete flexibility.
A vital part of any successful information library is the method by which the item is catalogued when stored. This importance grows exponentially as the types of data, number of users and the reasons for retrieval expand.
For software to offer real value when working in conjunction with a digital asset library, it also needs to automatically locate items from within the store. ODIN Assets meets this challenge via an all-encompassing classification system. The classification system depends on the definition of a group of characteristics which are defined when storing any item. This then provides a powerful recognition of the digital asset for retrieval by the user or function within the ODIN integrated solutions. The solution module runs either individually or integrated with the other elements of the ODIN Suite.
Additional benefits
At present, brand owners are working to tighter deadlines and ever increasing volumes of NPD and re-development, whilst marketing and merchandising initiatives are becoming more diverse. Essentially, departments with any business are constantly being asked to produce more for less.
The ODIN Assets re-cycler offers real savings to these departments by providing a powerful re-purposing capability, which means the asset store becomes a library and artwork studio all-in-one. This takes away the need for expensive duplication of photography and graphics work by giving all users the ability to re-cycle existing work. The availability of this capability also encourages innovation in both marketing and pack design without the reliance upon expensive external design resource.
Martin Hawkins, executive director of SBT, said: “ODIN Assets enables brand managers to embrace the future of the graphics industry. More and more material is becoming digitalised and eventually everything will be produced in a digital format. ODIN is already one step ahead by delivering graphics at the touch of a button, which will drive down the cost and speed up the process, as demanded by brand owners.”