They say the devil is in the details, and nowhere is that more apparent than in creative production.  Whether it’s getting everyone to show up on time or explaining how to interface with a system, costs can multiply exponentially when you’re not utilizing the right processes. That’s where GLOBALedit comes in.

GLOBALedit is an online photo and video platform that gives organizations worldwide control over the creative production process from capture to distribution. Companies utilizing it can positively impact their bottom line directly and indirectly by cutting down on everything from approval process timeframe to shipping costs. A webinar that takes place next week will showcase how the platform can improve your ROI. Attendees who attend will receive a free ROI and Business Case Whitepaper.

In the meantime, we talked with Mathieu Champigny, GLOBALedit VP of Sales & Marketing, to find out exactly how a company can and will see that impact on their bottom line when utilizing the platform.

DAM Coalition: Before we start talking about Return On Investment, can you tell us more about GLOBALedit?

GLOBALedit is part of Industrial Color Brands. Industrial Color Brands has been around for over twenty years and serves many areas of the creative industry. It’s composed of four different companies.

The first is Fast Ashleys Studios, which is our photo and video studio located in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The second brand is Industrial Color Productions that specializes in both still & video capture and post production. We specialize in still and motion for movies and television, fashion editorials or any sort of on-location production. In doing so we provide not only the equipment, but our expert digital technicians who offer years of hands-on experience to our customers. The third company is called Impact Digital, which offers high-end retouching for stills in the fashion, beauty, cosmetics and consumer industries. This brand serves some of the biggest beauty brands and advertising agencies. It’s really a full turnkey solution provider for still and retouching along with post production services, including, VFX and CGI. Our fourth company, Industrial Color Software, develops and hosts FileSociety and GLOBALedit.

We created GLOBALedit back in 2003 so the software has been helping global brands for a decade. We were working with the concept of the cloud when there was no cloud, so it’s something that’s really grown with and impacted the industry. Our digital techs were on set every day generating these terabytes of images but found that our clients, whether they were art directors, creative directors, photographers, editors or even ad agencies, were still printing in order to annotate the images or make selects and approvals. We witnessed firsthand the kind of waste that occurs when this part of the digital process is broken, and that was clearly the case. We looked for the right tool to make that process seamless but we were unable to find one. That’s when Industrial Color decided to create its own.

GLOABALedit is unique, because it is designed by creatives, for creatives.  And that’s why it serves our customer base so well. It’s a web-based system that specializes in the review and approval process, while also allowing people to collaborate in real-time (comments, annotations, markup, reporting, full integration with DAM systems). We have a full in-house development team dedicated to the platform that includes engineers, product managers and account managers who know every single account and work with our customers on a daily basis. 

All of the brands help us to have a real understanding of the needs of the market, and that’s especially valuable because we live and work in the creative production industry every single day.

Why do you consider GLOBALedit as an investment and not just another production cost?

When we’re talking about the tools that any company spends money on to get a job done, you have to consider them investments, as the goal is to save money on production. So GLOBALedit certainly is an investment, but it’s much more than just a production tool because the end goal is slashing the time it takes to get from the photo shoot straight to market. By slashing production time, creative teams are able to focus on what they’re there to do instead of dealing with logistics.  It’s an investment because the platform saves you production costs and allows you to produce much more in less time while reducing stress.

Many companies are using workflows that are still very manual and rely on the exchange of physical drives amongst team members to make changes or approvals. That means people are going to be waiting on something (or somebody) to move the project to the next step.  Whether that’s waiting for someone to review a set of images, waiting for the Creative Director to provide notes, or for everyone to sign off on a final piece, this kind of waiting is a production cost that rarely is noticed or talked about. And GLOBALedit reduces that timeframe exponentially.

A project that takes six to eight weeks could be cut to one or two weeks with GLOBALedit.  Being able to save weeks of production costs can turn into massive savings annually, as creative pieces can hit the market faster. For this reason the platform is an investment that can completely improve the bottom line of your creative production department or company.

Saving time is saving money, and that’s what GLOBALedit does.

Is it easy to quantify the return on investment for a SaaS based software such as GLOBALedit?

Most companies deal with fixed IT costs that might be allocated to departments or projects. At the end of the year these departments don’t really know what they’re paying for.

With a SaaS based software you don’t have any initial investment or upkeep costs. You remove any need for hardware or software requirements.  Those IT costs in terms of manpower are vastly reduced or simply eliminated. So when you’re looking at a solution that can be up in a matter of days and won’t have the kind of fixed costs that you normally associate with this sort of solution it’s easy to see what kind of ROI you’ll get.

The investment can be made fairly easily because you don’t have the costs of tens of thousands of dollars just in employees maintaining systems.  When you buy a piece of software it comes with a support system that usually equals 20% of the cost, so within five years you’ve actually paid double for what your software should have cost. And that’s without even considering the hardware costs. 

Since GLOBALedit is purely SaaS-based it can be utilized immediately with no programming time. Our world-class account management team takes care of all the training and support, so you don’t need to worry about those kinds of ancillary or ongoing costs. The investment can really save time and money across every level of production so you’ll see a direct and indirect impact on your bottom line. 

So would it be fair to say the amount of time people are going to save with this solution is what they’ll notice the most once it’s been utilized?

Absolutely, yes.

When we look at most conventional workflows, we’re always amazed at the hours that are being spent by employees doing very simple repetitive tasks. Teams spend hours looking for and pulling photos or videos. Hours with the legal team to iron out an instance (or several) of non-approved or expired assets being released. Hours searching for a particular reference from a shoot that took place less than a year ago. Hours spent putting contact sheets together. With GLOBALedit all of that is eliminated, and we’re cutting what was sometimes taking an employee five hours down to seconds. We’re talking about processes that used to require twenty people in different parts of the country or the world, to now five collaborating online.

When we look at a creative workflow we always ask, “How much time can be saved?”. Even if a workflow includes twenty people, perhaps we can try to save each person an hour or more a day.  That equates to tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars saved at the end of the year. And that means you’re saving money every single day.

So would it be fair to say the amount of time people are going to save with this solution is what they’ll notice the most once it’s been utilized?

I would say so, yes.

When we look at what GLOBALedit does and what a creative workflow is for a company, we’re always amazed at the hours that are being spent by employees doing very simple things. Hours looking for and pulling photos or videos. Hours with the legal team trying to work through an issue when someone has used an asset when it was not approved.  Hours searching for a particular reference from a shoot that took place less than a year ago.  With GLOBALedit all of that is eliminated, so we’re talking about cutting what was taking an employee five hours down to seconds. We’re taking about processes that used to require touches from twenty people now only needing to be touched by five. 

When we look at a workflow we always ask “how much time can be saved?” So even if that workflow needs to have twenty people in it, perhaps we can figure out how to save each person an hour a day.  That equates to thousands of dollars saved at the end of the year and that means you’re saving money every single day.

How fast can a company see the savings in its creative process by using GLOBALedit?

Savings are noticeable on Day 1!  Since GLOBALedit is fully web-based it can be implemented in a matter of days.

There is of course some ramp up time, but that’s why we have a dedicated account management team that’s responsible for everything from the setup of the system to customizing the interface to overseeing the online and on-site training of the end users. We really work with our customer to make sure they’re comfortable with the interface so that they can utilize GLOBALedit immediately and enjoy the benefits.

Say you’re on a photo shoot on the East Coast and you wrap at 5pm and your Art Director is on the West Coast.  Instead of shipping them a drive and waiting to get feedback a couple of days later, the Art Director can approve images by the end of the same day.  So you’ve basically moved the schedule up by at least two days right there, since you can have these two creatives collaborating on the same set of images in a quick and effective manner.

That’s without even considering the costs of shipping hard drives, the costs for multiple coordinators or assistants to handle those images, or the costs that are associated with losing images.  Not to mention what happens when there’s a delay at any point in the process (remember physically shipping contact sheets all over the world to get approvals from these high executives?). Savings start right after implementation and the ROI is immediate.

What kind of a learning curve is there for people on all different sides of the production process with GLOBALedit?

The learning curve is quick because GLOBALedit is really and truly built for creative people by creative people.

We designed the entire interface to be similar to what creative teams are already using on set, so most people in production are familiar with the interfaces as soon as they start.  For an entire organization the ramp-up period is around a week or two, and then they’re able to really start seeing all of the benefits of GLOBALedit.

We’ve seen that companies who use the solution on a critical or high exposure project find production times drastically reduced, so they end up expanding it to day-to-day creative operations. This roll out process allows them to quickly implement the system to their entire organization without missing a beat.

What's next at GLOBALedit? What's on the roadmap for GLOBALedit to bring more value to its customers?

We’re proud of the fact that we’ve always been the first to bring to market new technologies and add more features and value to our existing platform. And we keep doing that.

For example, our iPad app was released only weeks after the iPad was launched! We’re very proactive when it comes to new developments in the market. It is one of the few Work-In-Progress (WIP) review and approval tools that creative teams can really trust since it’s designed specifically for them.

We’re also always rolling out new versions with upgrades and updates that provide enhanced user experiences. In the short term, one of our goals is to release a new iPad app that’s totally revamped and has even more features. We are a fully agile development company and release updates in two-week sprints. Due to the popularity of GLOBALedit, we recently added several top Product and Development Engineers to ramp our development velocity. 

Speaking in terms of the big picture, we always work to create exciting, collaborative tools but are also focused on the mobile platforms that can be easily customized to fit a particular customer’s need. Most of our customers want to be able to work anywhere at anytime. They want GLOBALedit to act, feel and look like it would if they were in the office. So the customization and accessibility of the platform are things we’re actively working to make even better!

It’s a really exciting time for us in terms of development, but at the end of the day we love being able to help people collaborate effectively on their projects, and create something that resonates with their creative teams and clients. The next three to six months are going to be exciting and I’m sure the market is going to be amazed with what we have in store for GLOBALedit.

How can we learn more about GLOBALedit?

We are a creative company with direct access, so if you go to the contact page on our site you’ll find our phone number and contact form.  In either case, you’ll be able to work with someone directly and have your question answered.

We can offer you demos, case studies, and other info that will showcase how you can increase your productivity and impact your bottom line.  Our account management team is always available to answer any question you might have, whether it’s a simple inquiry or a detailed question about the system. 

You can also find more info at https://www.globaledit.com/

And don’t forget to sign up for our webinar that talks more in-depth about ways to improve your bottom line. Attendees who attend will receive a free ROI and Business Case Whitepaper. Register today!