approvals – TwonaBlog

October 6, 2023

Forget Email Attachments: Modernizing Packaging Approval with Digital Solutions

Picture this scenario: endless email threads, multiple attachments in several emails as the size limit is reached, wrong attachments sent, lots of back-and-forth to explain that the attachment was wrong and here is the correct one, version confusion… If this is your day-to-day, you can see how it is a recipe for delays, miscommunication, and even the occasional oversight that can have far-reaching consequences.

Thankfully, you can stop that chain of inefficiency and elevate packaging approval processes to new heights of effectiveness—using digital solutions that go beyond the limitations of email attachments.

The Limitations of Email-Based Approvals

Email has long been a staple in communication, but when it comes to managing critical processes like packaging approvals, it falls short in several key areas:

1. Fragmented Communication: Email threads often span across various messages, making it challenging to maintain context and track changes accurately.

2. Version Control Nightmares: Multiple attachments with similar filenames can lead to confusion, especially when different versions are being reviewed concurrently.

3. Delayed Responses: Emails can be buried in overflowing inboxes or overlooked amidst the deluge of messages, causing delays in approvals.

4. Lack of Accountability: It’s hard to ascertain who has reviewed or approved a design at any given point in time, making accountability a murky area.

The Digital Leap: What Modern Approvals Demand

Fortunately, there are digital solutions that tackle the challenges of packaging approvals. These solutions offer a range of features that revolutionize the approval process:

1. Collaborative Workspace: Imagine a virtual space where stakeholders can congregate, review designs, provide feedback, and hold discussions—all within a single, organized platform.

2. Version Tracking: A digital system maintains a comprehensive history of design versions, enabling easy comparison and minimizing errors caused by outdated versions.

3. Transparent Approval Paths: Digital solutions allow you to define and visualize approval paths clearly, ensuring designs navigate through the correct channels without bottlenecks.

4. Automated Reminders: Say goodbye to chasing approvals. Automated notifications ensure that reviewers are prompted at the right time, reducing approval cycle times. You can also choose to send manual reminders.

5. Accountability and Audit Trails: Each action is recorded, creating an audit trail that clarifies who did what, when, and why—an essential feature for compliance-driven industries.

The Transformative Impact: Efficiency and Precision Redefined

Do you need to hear about the advantages of using such a digital solution ?

1. Streamlined Workflows: With collaborative workspaces, design reviews become intuitive and streamlined, eliminating the confusion associated with email chains.

2. Rapid Turnaround: Design approvals take less time, enhancing your ability to bring products to market swiftly and seize new opportunities.

3. Enhanced Accuracy: Version control hiccups and miscommunications become a thing of the past, reducing the chances of errors slipping through the cracks.

4. Compliance Confidence: Industries subject to regulations can breathe easier knowing that an accountable, traceable process is in place.

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So, are you ready to leave the era of email attachments behind and embark on a journey towards efficient, compliant, and precise packaging approvals? If you are, please give a try to our approvals solution and then, contact us to help you implement it for your team.

March 3, 2023March 3, 2023

The Jack / Jacqueline of all trades

Labeling and Artwork management is a critical aspect of product development and packaging. It involves the creation, organization, and distribution of all labeling and artwork used on a product, including packaging, promotional materials, and instruction manuals.

To guarantee that the packaging meets your brand’s requirements and is produced to a high standard of quality, companies hire Artwork Coordinators. This role, which is often undervalued, is critical to the success of product launch. Why is that?

Artwork coordination is a multi-faceted role. It involves a lot of juggling between activities that are interconnected, and working as liaison with diferent departments or stakeholders even external to your own team. It also involves some technical knowledge and a good eye for detail. All this makes an Artwork Coordinator a complex role with a lot of hidden skills needed to be successful.

Brief Creation

The artwork coordinator creates a brief/work order/request for the designer or agency responsible for producing the packaging artwork. The brief outlines the packaging requirements, including the brand guidelines, technical specifications, and any other relevant information. Being able to collate information from multiple sources, make it understandable and actionable, and distinguish between relevant and accesory information is a key still to have for this role.

The coordinator needs to ensure that the brief is clear and concise, allowing the designer or agency to create the packaging artwork that meets the brand’s requirements. If you want to know more about how this brief should look like for success, take a look at our earlier post on this matter.

Juggling of Multiple Projects and Deadlines

The role of an artwork coordinator also requires them to manage multiple projects simultaneously. It is not rare that an artwork coordinator would be dealing with tens of projects at the same time. Some of them would be more urgent than others, and some would have extra complexity or require extra time to produce (e.g. think of a label versus a leaflet, or a new product versus a change).

This is why good time management and being able to see the big picture are relevant criteria, so that the workload is effectively managed, and they can ensure that all projects are delivered within the specified timeline. The coordinator needs to be able to prioritize projects based on their importance, deliver and receive input on time, and not loose control of which status each project is at.

Coordination (of course!)

Artwork coordination requires effective communication skills to gather requirements and input with different teams involved in the packaging production process. The artwork coordinator needs to understand the needs of the brand, the regulatory teams, the translation agencies, the quality team, the printer, the suppliers… to ensure that the packaging artwork meets everyone’s requirements. They need to be able to manage the project timeline and update all the parties involved with any changes or progress made. The coordinator also ensures that the artwork is produced on time and meeting the quality, regulatory, and industry requirements.

Chaser

An artwork coordinator is also responsible for obtaining approvals from various stakeholders involved in the packaging production process. They need to follow up on the approvals, ensuring that the artwork is approved on time, and any feedback is incorporated into the artwork. The coordinator needs to be persistent in chasing approvals while maintaining good communication with all stakeholders, which at times could be a hard thing to do.

Final Reviewer

An Artwork coordinator is responsible for bringing a packaging product from start to end succesfully. Therefore, after they have all feedback incorporated into the design, they will then proceed to ultimately review and confirm the artwork meets all required quality standards. They check for any errors or inconsistencies in the artwork and make sure that the files are print-ready.

The coordinator also ensures that the artwork files are compatible with the printer’s specifications, minimizing any issues during the printing process. All this requires a certain level of technical knowledge about how printing works, which can be aquired with time, but always comes as a nice to have /must have criteria in job offers. So learning about color separation, bleeds, kerning, pantones, varnish or proofing is not a bad idea if you are considering a job like this!

We have put together a simple PDF explaining the multiple “hats” of an artwork coordinator.
Download it if you are interested in being an artwork coordinator or want to explain to your parents what it is that you do for work 🙂

Download PDF

February 3, 2023February 3, 2023

Oh god….another feedback round.

Design approvals from multiple stakeholders (regulatory, marketing, client, printer, CMO) can be a challenging and time-consuming task for artwork managers and design teams. It’s like trying to herd cats – it’s impossible, but you still have to try! In today’s heavy workloads, it’s important to streamline the design approval process and save time, reduce delays and ensure projects are completed on time and with as few rounds as possible. What are the 2 key challenges of getting approval rounds right?

Challenge 1: Managing Multiple (often too many) Feedback Loops

When working with multiple stakeholders, there’s always the risk of conflicting opinions, which can result in endless rounds of revisions and delay the project. Quality might ask to add one end of sentence dot, Regulatory wants to skip it to launch the product, Marketing is changing the color of the flap….again, while the printer realised they attached the wrong dieline. OMG moment. To overcome this, it’s important to establish clear lines of communication and a structured review process. This includes setting up regular check-ins, clear expectations and deadlines, and establishing a centralized system for feedback and revisions.

Challenge 2: Balancing Speed and Quality

Another key challenge in managing design approvals is balancing speed and quality. In order to ensure that projects are completed on time, it’s often necessary to move quickly through the design approval process. However, this can result in missed details, oversights, or incorrect approvals. On the other hand, taking too much time to review and approve can be costly or simply unacceptable. To balance speed and quality, it’s important to set realistic deadlines, involve the right people at the right time, and establish a clear and consistent review process.

Bonus Quiz: Serial or Parallel Approvals?

One key component of a proper approval process is the establishment of approval model. This is in many oranizations overlooked and underrated. Let me explain.

The Serial Approval Process

When multiple stakeholders are required to provide feedback and approval, it is common practice to request such approval one stakeholder at a time. The argument that we typically hear is that this allows the design team to fix errors early on before the “important” stakeholders take a look. Every time we face this, it hurts. Intermediate and uncompleted feedback rounds only cause MORE WORK, not less. They also increase the risk of introducing unwanted mistakes.

The Parallel Approval Process

An alternative approach is to request feedback and approval to all stakeholders at the same time, and wait for all responses before issuing a new version. This comes with its own challenges is hardly suited for a traditional email/paper based model.

Golden Tip: Implement an Automated Approval Workflow

To improve and simplify the design approval process, it’s recommended to implement an automated approval workflow. Automated workflows can help streamline the review and approval process, reducing the time it takes to complete designs and minimizing the risk of missed details or oversights. With an automated system, all feedback and revisions are stored in one central location, allowing teams to track the status of each design in real-time. This suits the Parallel Approval Process really neatly and helps to keep the process organized, reduces the risk of conflicting feedback, and ensures everyone is on the same page. It’s like having a GPS for your design approvals – you’ll always know where you’re going and how to get there!

Managing approvals can be a complex and time-consuming process. But, with the right approach, it can be a straightforward and efficient process. By establishing clear lines of communication, balancing speed and quality, and implementing an automated approval workflow, organizations can streamline the design approval process, save time and ensure projects are completed on time and with a few iterations as possible. And, most importantly, they can have a little more peace of mind and a little less stress.

December 4, 2022June 30, 2023

Simplifying approvals is possible

Simplifying approvals with Twona AMS Feedback tool

Releasing a new product at a specific time can be very important for the results,the time factor will always be something to consider. If we are dealing with a deviation that implies a withdrawal from the market, speeding up the changes will be even more critical and always with several departments involved.

The approvals of our packaging materials have been traditionally managed via email in two different ways:

Serial process: in sequence you ask for feedback to different stakeholders and when one material is approved the next step can begin consecutively.
Parallel process: we ask for feedback to different stakeholders in different departments at the same time.

When we talk about approvals there are usually at least 3 departments involved, for example regulatory affairs, marketing, quality or your technical colleagues. As many people we need feedback from,the more difficult the email process becomes.

It is not impossible, but it certainly takes a lot more effort to find, trace and control the process, not to mention the increased probability of errors and the delay it can cause.

How does your company manage approvals among departments? What about when there are external stakeholders involved in the process like a printer?

This is how we handle approvals within our artwork management software (AMS), Twona:

Select the file: we select in our system the file from which we need feedback from. The file with unique identifier associated with a single project:
Fill in the form: where we specify the permissions that you can see below, the subject, the recipients and we include our comments to give it context.
Receive email: stakeholders, within our organisation or external users, will receive an email to access the approval screen and give their feedback.
Review file (s): here we can leave comments in the text field or leave sticky notes in the file itself, we can also add files if necessary as well as give our approval or rejection eventually.
Control approvals: in Twona (AMS) there is a direct access in the upper menu to the approvals with the necessary indications to know the status of the process.

Once you work this way, there comes a time when you wonder how you were able to manage so many approvals without making mistakes.

This is how we manage the packaging materials together with the comparisons tool (X-RAY) and everything offered by the artwork management software, Twona, but that’s another story.

I wonder how you resolve this process today and I invite you to leave us your comments.

Do you miss any relevant information or step for your approvals?

PS: Do you want to give it a try?? www.twonas.com/getapprovals (limited usage applies)