How Italian lighting manufacturer Ivela streamlines marketing and collaboration with WoodWing Assets

Results & Benefits

• Faster access to assets for higher operational efficiency
• Automated catalog production, saving a week per month of design time
• Improved collaboration and distribution of assets to partners

About the customer

Ivela is an Italian lighting design and manufacturing company, selling products and services via a network of partners across Italy and beyond. With over 35 years of experience supplying the B2B market, Ivela provides designers and retailers with products, product specification sheets, and technical drawings, so they can elevate client spaces through bespoke architectural lighting solutions.

Founded in 1986, Ivela operates through two brands. Ialux is dedicated to the production, marketing, and sale of lighting products for the high-end cruise ship sector, while Aria focuses on the retail, hospitality, and residential sectors.

Ivela has particular expertise in R&D, engineering, manufacturing, and product management. All of Ivela’s products and components are sourced and manufactured in the design capital of Italy, and all products are designed and manufactured in-house at their extensive manufacturing plant on the outskirts of Milan.

Challenge

Ivela needs to manage a significant volume of digital assets across numerous departments. Their design team needs to collaborate on technical drawings in-house, finalizing complex graphics that are critical to customer success. Then they need to share these assets - technical drawings, designs, and concepts - with their customers and extensive installation partner network.

The brand also commissions and undertakes product photography for marketing purposes. It also produces a biannual printed catalog and extensive online listings comprising both product imagery and technical drawings.

Additionally, they contribute to design libraries and maintain their own archive, providing long-term access to designs. ‘In recent years the archive has increased quite a bit in terms of volume, so we will certainly continue in this direction,’ says Bonvini.

Given the business-critical nature of their digital assets, Ivela’s leadership team recognized that improving their digital asset management would improve their overall business performance - from operational efficiency to brand reputation and customer satisfaction.

Up until this point, Ivela had used shared folders on a local server to manage their digital assets. But this posed significant problems and inefficiencies.

Searching for an image or product sheet required staff to search folder by folder until they found it. While sharing assets with clients - technical drawings, photographs, presentations, photometric curves, etc - meant sending them via email, FTP site, or DropBox.

Evaluation

Ivela engaged GMDE - an Italian software consultancy known for its expertise in publishing solutions - to help them evaluate and implement a new digital asset management solution.

Ivela needed a DAM system that could:

• provide plenty of storage space for their growing archive
• link to their Product Information Management system to automate marketing processes
• improve digital asset discoverability by providing quick and intuitive ways to find files
• allow for the easy sharing of digital assets with customers and partners via online links
• create a centralized, single source of truth for all departments to use and access

GMDE is a part of WoodWing’s approved partner network and immediately identified WoodWing Assets as an ideal solution for Ivela’s use case.

Ivela evaluated the recommended tool based on the simplicity of use, explains Ivela’s Marketing Communication Manager, Valentia Bonvini. ‘Given the pressing need to obtain a useful tool for both design and development, we evaluated a software solution that, in our opinion, was as simple and complete as possible.’

PIM integration

‘The integration of Woodwing Assets with our PIM supports the efficient publication of product information both on websites and in catalogs and brochures typeset with Indesign. It makes all the daily activities of the marketing department easier.’

‘The link to our custom PIM has solved as many communication issues as possible while also reducing the error margins related to technical information reported on product sites.’

Improved digital asset discoverability

‘The introduction of WoodWing Assets has made it possible to significantly streamline the process of identifying assets dedicated to each need and project.’

‘The ability to have a single reference for information retrieval has been of paramount importance in streamlining processes while avoiding waste of time and energy.’

‘To date, we can find information more easily for both internal and external stakeholders. The ease with which they can be sent has been a further step forward in the almost extemporaneous processing of requests.’

Easy sharing of digital assets

‘The generation of [sharing] links for posting material is one of the levers that allowed us to sponsor it at the time of selection. This enabled us to solve many problems in sending even very data-intensive material.’

Single source of truth

‘The real plus is having a single tool to refer to. For each inquiry, information, research, etc, we always know who to turn to. From our point of view, it has been crucial in implementing certain processes and generating procedures to simplify the passage of information internally and externally. That is why we feel we would recommend such a tool to anyone, depending on their business needs.’

• Faster access to assets for higher operational efficiency
• Automated catalog production, saving a week per month of design time
• Improved collaboration and distribution of assets to partners
• Single source of truth for all departments and colleagues
• Enhanced ability to archive and retrieve assets
• Better internal and external communication.