Designing for Profitability With Six Efficient Elements

By Ron Romanik

The time pressure of today's product and package design cycles require that new efficiencies in workflow be implemented to keep up with the competitive on-shelf environment, where even the best new designs don't stay new for very long.

Viewing any retail or supermarket store shelf means that you're witnessing a flat-out brawl as Brand A vies with Brands B, C, and every other letter of the alphabet to win the affection of the consumer. In an increasingly competitive and cost-conscious global market, consumer product companies not only must get product to market at breakneck speed while simultaneously ensuring their product and package have the appeal necessary to be chosen and placed into a shopping cart.

More and more, this make-it-or-break-it sales factor revolves around graphically appealing package design. Brand managers are charged with building brand identity, awareness, and loyalty in a fast-paced environment, and look for ways expedite the process. One new tool introduced this fall that may help is a product and initiative called Design Life-Cycle Management by Esko-Graphics.

Esko-Graphics is an industry leader in packaging pre-production solutions and a global supplier of prepress systems for commercial printers. The Design Life-Cycle Management software and hardware initiative promises to streamline the package design and production process—from ideation through design, packaging, and production—to produce significant cost and time savings.

DLM and PLM

The Design Life-Cycle Management (DLM) solution is a systematic, web-networked process that can be integrated without having to uproot systems that are already in place, thus avoiding causing massive disruptions to existing workflow. As design has become the critical differentiator for product and package innovation among manufacturers, Design Life-Cycle Management serves as an integral component of a broader Product Life-Cycle Management (PLM) solution. PLM enables manufacturers to work within a collaborative environment so as to manage product design, production, and manufacturing from start to finish.

"Our work with consumer product companies, private-label retailers and their graphic communications partners has given Esko-Graphics the experience to drive cost out of the design-chain," says Simon James, executive vice president & general manager, Esko-Graphics. "Our Design Life-Cycle Management solutions will speed time-to-market and dramatically reduce costs, while also helping to eliminate errors."

The larger field of PLM gives organizations the ability to exchange project information in real time across the complete project lifecycle. A number of PLM projects have been recently undertaken by Fortune 500 companies, and those have produced substantial cost and time savings.

"In addition to the efficiencies engendered by our Design Life-Cycle Management solutions, perhaps the key benefit is providing a collaborative platform across the entire supply chain that fosters innovation," James says. "Managing and encouraging innovation is rapidly becoming the strategic competitive advantage across a swath of industries."

Six-step structure

Esko-Graphics looked objectively at the real-world design process, and divided it into six steps, or elements. Within the Design Life-Cycle Management (DLM) framework, paying close attention to the six key elements within the package design process itself will enable brand managers to foster innovation, bring product to market more quickly and cost-effectively, and maximize existing resources to their fullest potential. These elements, as useful for DLM as for any design project, are:

1. Communication. The most critical element in any design endeavor is effective communication. Before the actual graphic design process even begins, key players within the design chain—managers, designers, suppliers, sales people, and the client—must have the ability to communicate with one another as seamlessly as possible, even if all are scattered around the globe. With efficient enterprise-level communication among marketing, design, legal, R&D, Q&A, and engineering teams—and even outside vendors and retailers—bottlenecks can be avoided that otherwise would drastically slow the entire process.

2. Design. At the heart of the package design process is graphic and structural design. Today, Adobe Illustrator and Esko-Graphics ArtiosCAD reign as the core software applications of choice among creatives in these fields. For the brand manager, it is important to know how these tools can be used and customized to meet the specific needs of a particular organization or job.

3. Collaboration. Knowing that speeding up time-to-market is of paramount importance to CPCs, the review and approval process in package design must be streamlined. All too often, projects are halted because a key decision maker within the design chain is unable to participate in the approval process in a timely manner. Parallel to the communication process, collaboration must be efficient and, preferably, happen in real time.

4. Workflow. Several workflow processes need to be factored into the package design process: graphic, structural, asset management, and job management. Great package design means not only having superlative creative conceptualization, but also being able to transform that treatment into a clean, error-free file for a packaging printer to output. Concurrently, the culling and distillation of a plethora of data such as design specifications and assets, job parameters, and cost information is critical to operations management and reporting.

5. Creation of mock-ups. The next step in the process is to produce a prototype. It's the tactile nature of this sample that affords the design team the ability to make a working assessment of the treatment.

6. Presentation. The showing of a package in its final state closes the loop of the six-stage process. At this point, final sign-off is attained, whereupon a package design moves into the manufacturing realm for mass production.

Following these six steps systematically will serve not only to help speed product to market, but maximize design efficiencies and, perhaps most important, foster innovation. CPC giants are revamping themselves internally in terms of how they now approach product manufacture, marketing, understanding consumer needs, and growing the bottom line.

The six-element structure is the backbone of the software and hardware solution of Design Life-Cycle Management, which is also a strategic tool that can accelerate the development of market-leading packaging innovations. Key features in the Design Life-Cycle Management solution are based around Esko-Graphics' Scope workflow products. Components of Scope include DeskPack, BackStage, PackEdge and WebCenter. Fully customizable to meet the specific needs of its clients, all solutions are modular, allowing easy upgrades and additions over time as client needs change and evolve. For more information, visit the Esko-Graphics Web site at www.esko-graphics.com