Like all software investments, a DAM system can have additional upfront expenses including costs for storage servers, staff training, and IT support. But for large organizations that create, manage, deliver, and archive many thousands of digital assets every year, the ROI can be significant.

1. Are Digital Asset Management Systems Worth It?
Every company must be diligent in their efforts to win new business. A Digital Asset
Management (DAM) system can be used as a part of your offerings or capabilities to potential
new customers. By demonstrating how DAM can facilitate file searching, retrieval and
collaboration, many DAM customers justify cost savings based on new business pitches
alone.
Some companies look at DAM as an externally billable service, or provide it at no charge to
entice customer loyalty. Many businesses find that once they have a customer using their
DAM solution, it will become part of that customer’s internal workflow, and subsequently
makes it much more difficult for those customers to disengage. Be sure to include any sales or
new business development employees in the DAM solution. Those employees are often
looking for new things to show to existing customers in the drive for new revenues.
Many diverse factors are considered when determining ROI. Two of the most common
approaches with ROI consider either many smaller, short term gains, or one larger, long term
gain. Initially, most companies opt for the short term approach. By measuring many small
advances or savings in labor or materials, and then extrapolating those numbers across
multiple employees, and departments, and companies, a small handful of modest examples
can quickly add up to the numbers required to justify the cost of a DAM system. Benefits of a
short term ROI include a reduced risk for justification, quicker turnaround and performance of
the investment, and a smaller scope.
With many ROI scenarios, if one doesn’t bear out in the final tally, others are still able to
prove the point. Smaller examples also mean easier and quicker measurement of the
investment’s performance. For example, if a company does in-house production, a DAM
system is a tremendous benefit. Most production departments use a rough calculation where
employees should bill 300% of total employee cost (salary plus benefits.) So if an employee
costs the company $100,000 per year, the production team may target a $300,000 average
billing per resource. Given a 240 work day year, that breaks down into $1250 per day or a
$150 per hour billable target.
Using a very conservative example, with a production team of 5 people, saving each of them
½ hour per day equals $90,000 per year (5 people x (.5 x hourly rate of $150) x 240 days per
year). Often production employees spend at least 30 minutes per day just searching for assets.
Most production managers look at the non billable costs for the return on investment (ROI,)
and show this savings as additional income possible with the same staff, versus justification
for employee reduction. To put it another way, that $90,000 in labor currently is typically
unbillable, and that labor could instead be used for billable work. That shows new income
without a related increase in labor making the department more profitable.
The scope of the project can be a double edged sword. Keeping the scope small affords lower
overhead cost, but at a proportional increase to the burden of proof to that smaller group. A

2. larger scope diversifies and insulates the risk, but the overhead in documenting a larger set of
requirements will add to the DAM solution timetable.
Regardless of whether the ROI will be proven in the short term or longer term, plan for
flexibility and modifications down the road. Many DAM customers repeatedly demonstrate
how the single investment continues to pay dividends well after the ROI has been proven.
Once the base solution is installed, a minor reinvestment in a DAM solution can have large
rewards. Additional clients, business units or company initiatives are often introduced to
existing DAM ecosystems with minimal or fractional additional costs. Long term flexibility
should be a cornerstone of any DAM solution. This technology in particular touches many
different areas of the company, and allowing the DAM to either feed or pull from other
business processes is essential. To this end, workflows should be designed to be easily
modified as business requirements change. Adobe’s eXtensible Metadata Platform (XMP) is a
good technology to keep in mind for this purpose. XMP is a labeling technology that allows
you to embed data about a file, known as metadata, into the file itself.
The immediate benefit of this is that your digital asset management system is not locked into
a proprietary database model, and those assets are much easier to share across multiple
systems. Adobe has made XMP the industry standard, and provides software libraries for
authoring or modifying the metadata of those assets.
Validation of ROI is often overlooked or undervalued. Be aggressive and optimistic, but with
a small readily identifiable example. An eighteen month target for the ROI is usually quite
achievable, but often the ROI is realized much quicker, sometimes within a few months.
Document the initial requirements, the final agreed to set of scope objectives, and what the
actual results were. Rarely does the finished solution exactly match the initial objectives, but
often additional sources of ROI are discovered along the way. This helps solidify the original
arguments and helps bolster the validation of the ROI.
DAM solutions are not impulse purchases. They require collecting all business requirements,
thoughtful consideration of sometimes opposing viewpoints, a commitment to driving the
process to completion and proving that the project was an unqualified success. Your DAM
vendor should have practical experience in how these solutions are presented, deployed, and
managed long term. By understanding the company’s fiduciary responsibility, and how the
company generates revenue, a DAM solution can provide a tremendous cost savings and a
source of revenue for many years.
About IO Integration
IO Integration is one of the leading system integrators in the United States, specializing in the
North Plains Xinet digital asset management solution, iBrams integrated brand management
solution, high-end server based automation, and web-based comprehensive approval and
production tools that provide profitable workflow solutions for creative organizations.