Like many other similar corporations, Thomson has traditionally outsourced its whole stock of digital assets to a reproduction house where a database of digitised scans of low and high resolution images is stored.

“Recognising that the business environment is becoming more and more electronic, we were keen to keep moving forward and optimise our operations using technology,” explains Thomson Travel Group project manager Sue Vaughan.

“Our brochure and web site work is absolutely critical to our business, the requirement to work with digital content is increasing and we need to be able to supply it. Whilst the majority of our customer contact is currently generated by our printed brochures, other media such as the Internet, digital television and so on are becoming increasingly important.”

Thomson Travel Group is comprised of Thomson Holidays, Lunn Poly travel agents, Britannia Airways, Crystal Holidays, Simply Travel and Budget Travel among others, is not only equipping itself for the future but reaping benefits for its entire business by centralising its content strategy.

Driven by the immediate need to deliver digital content for its business-critical Lunn Poly e-commerce initiative, Vaughan recently headed a project to install and migrate these 2D and 3D images and other digital assets into a more user-friendly inhouse electronic repository.

Picdar’s Media Mogul is used by teams of people in Thomson Holidays’ Public Relations, Publishing, New Media, Customer Relationship Management and Content Management departments. The system allows the company’s stock of images of holiday resorts and accommodation, as well as maps, graphics, charts and 3D images such as virtual tours of pool areas and bedrooms, to be managed, reformatted and controlled quickly and easily.

“The whole team [at Thomson] was impressed by the software’s ability to handle the images and by the tools for getting them into published media,” continued Vaughan.”

The system now holds in excess of 50,000 digital assets – mostly images and graphics – with around 15,000 of those ‘live’ in brochures at any time. Thomson say this figure is growing by 6 or 7,000 each year. The company can now store, reformat and represent images, maps and graphics for its brochures and web site from a single location.

“We’re all very excited about its potential. We can now get to everything at the click of a button. The teams here have never been able to see all of our images at once, let alone be able to find them so easily,” adds Vaughan.

All assets are indexed and linked so that they can be located easily through the search facility. Thomson’s stored digital assets can be viewed, transformed and dispatched on screen, reducing the need for hard copies and the need for consumables such as paper, film and chemicals.

Thomson is seeing savings in time and costs, improved workflow, and importantly greater access to increasingly important corporate assets that can be retrieved in any format at any time. The company intends to reap more significant cost, quality and consistency benefits as the system gradually evolves into a central repository for the entire business. Picdar’s operations director Andy Heather told delegates at the PrintMedia Management Forum that their system became a fundamental part of the publishing process within Thomson: “Key to this was to allow best of breed systems in other areas to integrate with our asset management solution, to leave them to do what they do best was an important technology driver.

“We find asset management is an infrastructure solution. It may well arrive in an organisation to deal with a ring-fenced business imperative, but the driver to deliver the biggest return is this integration which can happen incrementally as initial objectives are achieved and return on investment is acknowledged.”

Play the game
Different market but a similar problem: Hasbro is Europe’s number one toy and games company. It can receive up to 40 requests a day from 20 different countries for illustrations of their market leading products, from old favorites such as Action Man and Monopoly through to new arrivals like the Tweenies.

Visual images play a key part in the company's promotional activities, so having a fast, efficient means of storing and supplying those assets is very important.

“In the old days, this was a very manual process that was very labour intensive. The marketing companies filled out a form to request the image they wanted and that was part of the problem, they only had very limited visibility of what was on offer,” explains Alan Gong, vice president of the Hasbro Design Centre.

“The Picdar solution scored highly in several areas. Our business is complex, in that we store images by category, by division and by brand. We needed to be able to search the database using all those criteria and get to the asset as quickly as possible. Picdar's software was robust, fast, very flexible, and also used an open architecture, which meant we could connect this system to other applications easily,” says Gong.

The whole system was effectively configured within a three-month period, Picdar software would allow design staff to tag new product items as confidential, so that only selected users can view them before release.

The security of the images on the system is important, since Hasbro produces a number of toys, such as the Star Wars characters, under license. The watermarking and copyrighting features within the Picdar software ensure that there can be no infringements and illegal copying.

The system holds full international details of all their marketing companies’ contacts that can track when an image has been ordered, processed and dispatched. Should an item be lost in the post, then the order can simply be re-transmitted automatically.

Gong calculates that a small order of perhaps 10 images now takes 15 minutes to fulfill, compared with two hours previously. A larger order of 40 images, which would previously have required one to two days of effort, is ready in an hour and a half.

“We are offering a much more immediate, better quality service where we can be sure we are giving the users what they want,” states Gong. “Users can save previous searches for quick retrieval, review images at various sizes and request the image in jpeg or native file format such as Photoshop or Illustrator.”

The Picdar software has reduced the costs of supplying images and removed much of the mundane work involved and dramatically reduced administration, leaving design centre staff free to concentrate on more value added activities.