From Shelf Appeal to Safety – How to Master Artwork Management in the CPG Industry

With the global consumer packaged goods (CPG) market expected to hit $3.17 trillion by 2032, companies are under immense pressure to bring the right products to the market in the right place and time. Packaging artwork management is critical in ensuring products reach the market quickly and meet the evolving needs of customers and regulatory bodies alike.  

However, CPG companies face several challenges in managing their artwork that impact product appeal and safety. Read on as we dive into the packaging artwork challenges of the CPG industry and offer tips on mastering artwork management.

The Packaging Artwork Challenges of the CPG Industry ‍

Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) companies face various packaging artwork challenges that affect operations, market standing, and consumer satisfaction. Let’s look at the top hurdles

• Adapting artwork to fit new requirements: CPG companies face the pressing challenge of adapting artwork to fit new requirements. With new regulations, customer requirements, and campaigns constantly evolving, aligning existing artwork copies with the latest trends and changes is challenging.
• Simplifying packaging across multiple SKUs: The sheer number of SKUs in the CPG industry makes packaging a herculean task. Countless effort goes into developing a creative, innovative, and effective packaging solution. When multiplied by tens or hundreds of products, the challenges in understanding the intended target audience, ensuring the brand.
• Addressing existing product variations: CPG companies must address variations across a broader SKU portfolio. From accommodating seasonal products to offering flavor or size    , mastering artwork for different products in the same SKUs is critical to supporting growth, driving competitive advantage, and boosting customer satisfaction and loyalty.
• Complying with evolving packaging regulations: Another major challenge for CPG companies is complying with emerging regulations across all aspects of the packaging life cycle. Companies must constantly be ahead of the latest requirements, from packaging design to product labeling, to ensure compliance.
• Maintaining audit trails: Tracking all changes to packaging content and reviewing artwork is critical to ensuring transparency and accountability. However, maintaining a comprehensive audit trail can become complex given the many products, SKUs, and requirements.
• Streamlining version control: With multiple designers, product managers, and other stakeholders involved in the artwork management process, tracking changes and ensuring that all the teams can access and work on only the latest version is challenging. Manual approaches, unfortunately, do not guarantee that the latest approved version of the file is used when viewing and sharing.
• Identifying errors early in the life cycle: Errors are bound to happen in packaging. And for CPG companies dealing with many products, the chances of mistakes slipping through the cracks are always high. While it's impossible to ensure a 100% error-free rate, it’s essential to identify these errors early in the lifecycle so they don’t lead to unnecessary costs or delays.

Tips for Mastering Artwork Management

If you want to leverage speed and compliance as a competitive advantage in the CPG industry, you must streamline the packaging artwork management process. Here are some tips that can help you master CPG artwork management:

• Centralize artwork copy: Having one central location for all product pack copies can ease the process of content versioning, approvals, and translations. Dynamics dashboards can provide real-time tracking of projects, allowing for quick assessment of project statuses. Pre-built templates can enable stakeholders to enable artwork revisions, minimizing errors and enhancing accuracy seamlessly.
• Leverage AI to automate proofing: Automated proofing and comparison tools can help identify errors in digital designs and print proofs early in packaging.  These AI-proofing tools can analyze colors, layers, fonts, and barcodes, carry out spell checks across multiple languages, and even compare artworks, leaflets, and inserts, thus accelerating artwork review, approval, and management.
• Include designers in the workflow with Adobe Plugin: Adobe Illustrator and InDesign plugins can bring pack copy directly into the design tool and reduce cut-and-paste errors. This can help streamline your workflows for maximum efficiency, reduce the number of iterations, and expedite the launch of your products.
• Embrace a digital asset management platform: Investing in a digital asset management (DAM) platform is a great way to master artwork management in the CPG industry. A modern artwork management system can allow you to store, organize, and manage all product and packaging digital assets from a central system with easy search and retrieval options and ensure everyone is on the same page.
• Enable integration between various systems: Integrating the systems used for packaging artwork review is another great way to master artwork management in the CPG industry. Such integration ensures teams can access all the data they need from across the business to simplify artwork management and work on only the latest version. 
• Involve printers early in the workflow to avoid rework and delays: If you want to detect printing errors before your product hits the shelves, you must involve printers early in the workflow. By digitally checking your incoming packaging material at the plant, scanning it, and comparing it with the approved digital artwork file, you can enable comprehensive print inspection, prevent costly recalls, and facilitate informed decisions.

Artwork management in the CPG industry is complex, encompassing everything from content management to design, review, and release. Managing multilingual text and symbols for different products and SKUs demands a robust artwork review and proofing approach.

Learn how a digital asset management solution like ManageArtworks can centralize your digital assets and streamline your packaging supply chain. Contact us to know more.

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