A persistent challenge in highly regulated industries is getting the right label on the right product at the right time. Ever-changing regulations can make this a long and arduous task, particularly when these companies maintain the usage of outdated manual labeling and artwork management processes. It is clear that the introduction of an automated system can provide value, but the question is: how?

A quick thought experiment...

Consider a designer taking 30 minutes to create a label at $40 an hour. 1000 labels would cost $20,000 to produce conventionally. Not only can Automated Artwork Generation save $1000’s by producing labels quickly and automatically, it will get it right the first time too. This is a great advantage when it comes to responding to regulatory changes, making label changes a much more straight-forward, clean process. Furthermore, this method vastly minimises the risk of recalls, which can incur massive costs in high-stakes industries. In fact, we’ve found that in the case of many of our customers, automation has allowed organisations to reach an average label and artwork generation time of well under 60 seconds.

Real-life results

Throughout 2020, we at Kallik were able to capture highly impressive Veraciti™ user data. User data improved as the year went on, as a result of continuous development in Veraciti™ tools and technology. This, in combination with our release of Project Brief Manager 3, has allowed us to achieve spectacular results, such as a 50% reduction in project completion time at a major life science company. The very same tools and technology that delivered this incredible reduction simultaneously handled a 27% increase in the number of labels or artworks being generated by Veraciti™.

Of course, the migration of our solution to AWS has also been paramount in maximising these benefits. The added speed and security which the AWS cloud provides has aided our customers in countless ways, with enhanced resilience, full compliance with ISO/IEC standards, GxP requirements and data privacy, these benefits have had a knock-on effect.

Through the adoption of our automated platform, a leading medical device company can now process a typical monthly workload of over 8,000 artwork creation jobs at an average rate of one job per 37 seconds, in turn cutting average label and artwork project completion time from 52 to just 26 days. A major chemical company, meanwhile, has seen artwork generation times slashed by 75% over a four-month period to an average of just 12 seconds per artwork generation, with another in the oil & lubricants sector reaching just 3 seconds per task.

Innovative automated artwork and label management is the way forward

Organisations in highly regulated industries who are adopting automated artwork and label generation in favour of using manual processes or outsourcing design work to third parties are seeing major time and cost reductions. Through further investment and innovation, we hope that our Veraciti™ statistics will reflect these advantages even further as 2021 progresses. We are committed to providing our customers with optimal efficiency and results.

Beyond helping companies in highly regulated industries get to grips with disparate labelling and artwork processes, our findings also demonstrate the benefits of automation scale over time and as organisations grow their operations. Many of these organisations have traditionally employed third-party designers to create and amend artwork and labels to great expense, with these assets numbering in the thousands. The cost efficiencies for bringing these operations in-house and introducing automation are clear.

Automation has a critical role to play for industries such as medical devices, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, cosmetics and food & beverages, where regulations are tight and mistakes can have serious effects on brand reputation or consumer health. 

As we have seen with the rush to comply with EU Medical Device Regulations and the potential regulatory shifts of a prospective Brexit deal, the agility and centralised control of a dedicated artwork and label management solution has become a necessity for businesses rather than simply a nice thing to have; automation is the future of efficient and reliable label and artwork management.