10 questions to ask a vendor when choosing a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system

A translation and adaptation of an article from the Pimcore blog.

The article will help an owner or manager choose a DAM solution provider so that the investment in the system pays off.

The more digital content a company generates and uses, the more pressing the question of choosing a DAM system — that is, a digital asset management system — becomes for it. DAM makes it possible to optimize business processes in branding and marketing and to reduce the costs of producing, storing and updating digital assets for products and services. A DAM system automates the process of maintaining consistency of visual, audio and video information across all sales and marketing channels, social media and websites.

The out-of-the-box functionality of DAM systems varies depending on the vendor.

Plus, beyond a common set of features, each DAM system has specifics that may or may not suit you depending on your starting data. In this article, the Pimcore team has gathered the 10 main questions you should ask yourself and the vendor when choosing a DAM system so that the implementation pays off. And KT.Team has supplemented them with case studies from our clients' experience.

The first step in implementing a DAM system is to determine exactly which business tasks you want to solve with it.

To do this, you will need to gather input from all the departments that create, modify, store and use digital assets related to products and services.

Where are the pain points in their processes right now?

What is important to them in the future solution, and what is not?

How much time do they currently spend searching for the assets they need, and why? Businesses whose main bottleneck is the slow and non-obvious search for files and the cost of metadata management will benefit from DAM systems with advanced metadata management capabilities, such as Pimcore. Companies that face delays in asset approval and review will benefit from a DAM system with advanced collaboration and workflow capabilities, such as Picvario.

One KT.Team client, a large retail chain, named the risk of its current DAM system being shut off as one of its main pain points.

A foreign vendor could at any moment unilaterally stop working with CIS users.

For the retail chain this would mean that the product cards of 400,000 items in its catalog would be left without photos and videos, both on the chain's own sales channels and on marketplaces.

For this client, KT.Team specialists selected an open-source DAM that could be deployed on the company's own servers.

The second thing worth paying attention to is the DAM system's out-of-the-box feature set.

These need to be matched against your IT landscape architecture and the needs of your teams.

We will not touch here on the basic functions of storing, validating and filtering digital assets: the vendor only affects the nuances of how they are implemented, not whether they exist at all.

Therefore, the first thing to focus on is the advanced features that DAM systems provide. For example, AI image recognition, background removal, automatic tag generation, automatic watermarking, tools for video editing, or working with 3D files...

When choosing a DAM, it is better to focus on the needs you have right now or will have within the next six months to a year.

Each additional feature typically increases the system cost itself and requires more infrastructure resources. The second thing to discuss with the integrator or vendor is DAM integration capabilities with existing systems: a content management system (CMS), a PIM system (product information management system), marketing automation platforms, e-commerce systems, and supplier or distributor systems.

Are there ready-made APIs, connectors and integration modules, or will they have to be ordered separately?

Here the platform's open source code and the presence of a community come to the rescue.

The lower a system's popularity and the fewer business users it has, the less likely it is that ready-made modules or APIs have already been written and tested by someone.

The success of a DAM system implementation largely depends on how well it is adopted by users.

What matters here is not just whether you need a system at all (if you are considering it, you probably do), but first and foremost who will use it and which work tasks they need to solve with DAM.

Creative teams will most likely need tools for collaborating on files.

The e-commerce department will request a feature for delivering different sets of media content to different sales channels to meet marketplace requirements.

If the chosen DAM does not match the needs of its primary users, its implementation will bring many times less value than it could.

Also pay attention to whether the vendor or integrator provides comprehensive training and support so that users can use the system correctly.

Implementing the system is only the beginning.

When calculating TCO, you need to account for all costs related to implementing and supporting the DAM system. These include: - initial implementation and setup; - licensing fees, both initial and recurring if the chosen system is available only by subscription; - training business users; - the cost of extensions and add-ons needed for your work and not included out of the box; - market availability and the cost of specialists who will maintain the system, and so on.

Often a system that seems more affordable at the integration stage has a higher cost of ownership in the long run.

Within a couple of years, the initial benefit will be more than offset by ongoing payments and the difficulty of finding suitable contractors. For example, improvements within Brandquad's DAM functionality are only possible through the vendor. On the one hand, this removes the need to find a contractor. On the other, it increases the time and cost of each improvement, because you will have to work around the vendor's overall backlog.

Headless architecture is called a trend in building DAM systems.

But the question is not how well the future system follows the "fashion." The headless approach assumes that the system's back end and front end are separated from each other.

You can change the interface users work with without affecting already configured business processes.

For this client, a headless DAM system was a good fit.

But keep in mind that a headless DAM system requires higher technical expertise both from the contractor who will configure the system and from the team that will support it afterward.