By Martin Appleford-Cook

In the current economic environment cutting costs and streamlining processes are key to improving efficiencies in any business. Many of the day-to-day tasks that users carry out can be made more efficient by implementing a solution such as Brand Asset Management (BAM).

However, limited budgets mean that you need to prove that any new purchase will have a guaranteed Return On Investment (ROI) for it to be a priority. ROI analysis when used as part of a business case can help you evaluate the measurable benefits, risks and costs associated with any new system.

Put simply, ROI is calculated using the following formula:

For example, if you spend £30,000 on a new system and the savings you make with that system are £190,000 then the ROI calculation would be:  (160,000 - 30,000) / 30,000 giving an ROI of 4.33 to 1 or 433%.

Calculating the return or savings to be placed into the above calculation requires analysis of a number of key areas within the business. Some of these areas within Brand Asset Management are easier than others to quantify due to hidden and shared costs. Reduction in time taken to carry out day-to-day tasks is easier to measure, whereas measuring brand guideline usage and enforcement is harder to measure.

In general a BAM can help you achieve cost improvements by enabling greater productivity with more accuracy and better controls. These can come from cost reduction, cost avoidance, resource re-allocation, revenue generation and intangible business value such as brand consistency. To break these down further so that estimates can be put against them to form the foundation of an ROI our consultants typically investigate the following:

Asset Recreation / Duplication
Digital assets are often duplicated or re-created due to the inability of users to find exactly what they are looking for using ineffective search tools or inadequate metadata.

Search
Users can spend a large amount of their working day searching for information. Do your users have to search multiple locations or systems. Can they search on any aspect of an asset e.g. usage rights, file type and campaigns.

Distribution
Distribution costs can include physical media, labelling, admin, burning to disk, boxing up and ultimately shipping. Distribution costs can easily exceed £150. How long does it take from request to receiving an asset currently?

Process inefficiencies
How long does it take to create, share and approve assets? Can users comment and provide feedback efficiently?

Visibility and generation of new revenue streams
Can users convert or repurpose content to promote new materials and/or in new markets? Can they share ideas for promotions across teams and geographic locations? When a new product or design is agreed, how do users get to use these new files.

Brand Integrity
Brand guidelines are expensive to create and maintain - end users often don't know or have out of date guidelines. How is this currently managed? Are logos off brand, are corporate typefaces and colours correctly used?

Usage Rights
How are asset usage rights managed? What happens if an asset such as a rights managed photo expires? Where are these assets stored? What about permissions? How do you manage commercial usage agreements?

Access Rights
When an asset is modified or updated - can users get access to this once approved? Do they have to go through a lengthy process to request or can they download the right version according to user permissions and usage (e.g. low res version for a web page).

The above is a small sample of some of the areas that often need scoping in terms of current processes. However, any one of these key areas would provide a positive ROI - but by grouping them together (e.g. search, asset re-creation and distribution costs) you immediately start to realise that significant savings can be made within a relatively short period of time through using a Brand Asset Management solution such as VYRE On Brand. 

To give you an indication of the sort of savings you could make we've developed an interactive ROI Calculator which lets you try out various scenarious around search, distribution and duplication of digital assets.

Other considerations when building an ROI calculation are: Cross department/business unit analysis, investigation into speed of products to market to get a competitive edge, adoption of the solution across teams and business units to reduce total cost of ownership.

Finally, a good business case should combine ROI analysis for both tangible cost savings and efficiencies in resource management.  For example, reducing the time taken to: build a presentation, to localise a poster, to update a leaflet can have a significant impact on resources. This in turn saves time and money and allows staff to work on other priorities rather than long winded process.