Based in the US state of Georgia, House of Cheatham is a market leader in the area of personal and beauty care, offering a wide range of skin and hair care products, as well as hair therapies for women, children, and men. Introducing enterprise-grade systems and processes within a small to medium-sized organization is not always easy – particularly when IT resources are scarce, but House of Cheatham has responded to increases in global regulatory requirements by a complete digital transformation of its labeling and artwork management processes, by using Kallik’s Veraciti™, eliminating costly bottlenecks and reducing time to market.
Challenges
In the view of the company’s Executive Vice President, Jeff Carson, having built up an extensive portfolio of personal care products with strong brand allegiance, maintaining the latest versions of artwork files was becoming increasingly challenging. Labeling data files being used to create new artworks and/or undertake revisions requiring multiple iterations that caused downstream delays – delays further compounded by the use of external graphic artists and studios.
“Every time a label change was required, the business missed a key piece of information,” says Carson. “Essentially, our latest data files were disjointed from the process, and keeping up with the pace of change was proving to be difficult. We were typically experiencing up to nine amends per artwork before files could be approved and released to print.”
House of Cheatham recognized that to stay compliant with new regulatory requirements and to remain competitive in the marketplace, something had to be done. Another managenent conclusion was that that adopting a solution that minimized capital outlay on in-house IT resources was also the best fit for the business. Having evaluated several offerings on the market Jeff selected what he felt was the best in class cloud-based labeling and artwork management solution, namely Kallik’s Veraciti.
“Kallik stood out from the competition, as its team clearly understood the requirements of a small to medium business,” continued Jeff. “The scalability and flexibility of the proposed kallik solution also promised us amazing ROI, along with the exact functionality we needed. At the time of us making the decision, we decided Kallik was at least two years ahead of its nearest competitor using cloud technology.”
How Kallik helped
There have been a number of ways Veraciti has helped the company. Veraciti’s Asset Manager is allowing Carson and his team the ability to better process important data and track asset versioning more accurately. When it came to the creation of new versions, House of Cheatham has also gained the ability to only ever select the latest approved version to initiate projects. Having a full audit trail of the artwork approval process also means that the correct version of the artwork is always sent to the print supplier base.
“We are now using less staff time on this workflow, which allows the team to work on additional added-value projects. Our throughput has increased, but with the same number of staff: a true win-win situation.
“Kallik has also enabled us to identify and resolve bottlenecks in our processes that were previously difficult to detect, while Veraciti’s intuitive dashboards and automated reports allows us to measure the effectiveness of the whole launch process.”
Results
The benefits of the solution can be felt across the whole business. The key advocates of the solution are the marketing project managers as they are now able to drive projects with 100% accountability
by using Veraciti’s structured workflow tasks and reports.
“In the first year of implementing the solution, we processed 140 new artworks,” Carson continues. “Prior to Veraciti, the best we could achieve was 24 per annum. In the second year, we increased this figure to over 400, with no additional resources — a 17-fold increase in our artwork production levels compared to our previous solution. Not only this, but we’ve increased accuracy and taken significant costs out of the process.”
Veraciti has also had a positive impact on labeling inventory, reducing stock levels, while new labels can now be produced to an agreed critical path to ensure on-time delivery. Following successful adoption across the business, House of Cheatham now plans to expand the use of Kallik’s solution by using its Asset Manager as a way of controlling and versioning its ingredient declarations.
For Carson, “We’re delighted to have chosen Vericiti. We’re aware that there is much more we can do with the solution and look forward to rolling-out additional capabilities real soon, but overall Kallik’s solution has enabled us to start the artwork process from ‘a single source of truth,’ giving us huge time and cost benefits downstream.”
Additional Benefits:
- An average 6-fold increase in the number of artworks created per year compared to the previous in-house solution
- 80% improvement in speed to market, with 10 weeks taken out the process