Product designing and prototyping: How DAM helps with a faster time-to-market
Samples and prototypes are critical to bringing new products to market and selling them to retailers — but you can accelerate these processes to drive faster, more responsive design cycles.
Imagine a perfect world for designers: every material at their fingertips for analysis and collaboration, with all relevant information available instantly: pricing, availability and specifications.
In the real world, things often work differently.
Long cycle times and low visibility will result in situations such as:
- Retailers making frequent change requests, especially for private label products. At the lower end of the market, where margins are thinnest, this can hurt profitability.
- Every alteration – even a small, iterative one – requires new samples to be made. Sample manufacturing at one apparel manufacturer involved three-to-four-week delays for each new sample.
- Getting on top of new trends is difficult. Especially when digital native brands and vertically integrated “fast fashion” retailers can get products on store shelves without physically displaying sample merchandise for sell-in.
For one mainstream apparel manufacturer, creating a sample of a new product involved overseas manufacturing of the sample, followed by a design fitting and alterations.
Each sample dress shirt cost $100, and designers had to wait 3-4 weeks to see each of their new ideas come to life.
The frustration of the sample cycle is just a fact of life — or is it?
Accelerating physical prototyping
Creation of physical samples and prototypes involves handoffs and approvals that create confusion and delays.
Using Hyland’s Nuxeo Platform, product companies can develop prototypes faster, with more global collaboration and less rework.
This is a digital asset management (DAM) system that can make upstream systems for materials scanning and texture mapping visible to designers, so texture is easily visible in design previews.
With Hyland’s Nuxeo Platform, design tools (like Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, 3D rendering software, etc.) can be enhanced with connectivity to the materials reference library information that product designers depend on.
With easy access to a centralized materials library, designers can drag-and-drop chosen materials onto their designs for faster ideation and design times.
They can keep design files connected in their master formats and easy-to-share previews for review and approval, using the platform’s native capabilities for handling compound file types.
At the same time, they can establish consistent review workflows and make approvals easier, using built-in annotation tools and a configurable, low-code studio to build and modify automated workflows.
Hyland’s Nuxeo Platform federates search across many systems and teams all over the globe, making it easy and fast for your teams to discover and modify existing designs from sister brands, other teams or past seasons.
Designers can also use Hyland’s Nuxeo Platform to put design in the context of the overall supply chain, automatically verifying that all created designs can be manufactured with current supply chain constraints or available ingredients.
Future-ready strategy: digital samples & sell-in
The headache, expense and lead time of sample manufacturing is one reason many manufacturers have moved to digital samples and prototyping, using 3D renderings instead of physical objects.
Hyland’s Nuxeo Platform makes it easy to find and access materials information (ie: waterproof, available in yellow, price, etc.). Users can easily filter searches to take supply chain constraints into account. For instance, materials with a large minimum order size might only be made available for designs that don’t require a physical sample.
These benefits are especially clear at apparel companies, and the digital product design can shorten the fashion cycle by days if not weeks.
For wholesalers, digital samples can be taken even further. With digital showrooming, manufacturers can work closely with retail partners to iterate on designs quickly and inexpensively, accelerating orders.
Using Hyland’s Nuxeo Platform, manufacturers can create digital showroom portals that showcase products in an on-brand, on-trend way for retail customers. Using easy annotation and markup tools accessible directly in the digital showroom interface, buyers can make their needs clearer — and designers can respond faster than ever.
Where can Hyland’s Nuxeo Platform take you?
Every product-driven company has different product design processes. That’s why Hyland’s Nuxeo Platform offers a low code, configurable platform that adapts to the needs of your business.
Help your design departments and the downstream teams that depend on them become happier and more productive with a content platform that is designed to handle everything you create.
Whether your samples and prototypes are physical or digital, Hyland’s Nuxeo Platform is ready to help you boost your ability to design in context and iterate on samples faster.
If your business is ready for a sample creation process that boosts collaboration, reduces rework and saves money — Hyland’s Nuxeo Platform has a solution that can do this and so much more.
Ready to take the next step toward a modern, flexible solution?