It’s hard to imagine any business today that doesn’t rely on digital content. Pharma is not an exception but it is certainly unique in the sense that the company’s storage can consist of marketing materials, sensitive legal information, and medical papers at the same time. That’s why DAM in pharma is something that you ought to consider. Digital asset management helps you keep your collection of assets in an orderly fashion, while not sacrificing convenience or security.
It’s hard to imagine any business today that doesn’t rely on digital content. Pharma is not an exception but it is certainly unique in the sense that the company’s storage can consist of marketing materials, sensitive legal information, and medical papers at the same time. That’s why DAM in pharma is something that you ought to consider. Digital assets management system helps you keep your collection of assets in an orderly fashion, while not sacrificing convenience or security.
Benefits of Digital Asset Management for the Pharma Industry
Maintain brand consistency
Content marketing is king, even for pharmaceuticals. With so many prescription options for which malaise, marketing often becomes a deciding factor swaying a consumer towards you. Yet, marketing assets cannot be just quality. They also need to be consistent across all your marketing channels so as to not confuse your target audiences.
DAM gives you tools to keep track of all your assets (and where they are), while also simplifying their revisioning, management, and approval process. That way, your employees will never be confused about which version of an asset to use nor will they have issues finding all places where they need to update
Streamline workflows and save time
Digital asset management for pharmaceuticals helps retain focus on the important things by sidelining unneeded paper shuffling. Looking for required files takes up a lot of time. It might not seem as much because you’re searching for a few files at a time. Yet, these minutes add up fast. According to Gartner, employees might spend up to 50% of their workday looking for files. Finding one crucial file can take up as much as 18 minutes!
Thanks to its improved search capabilities, DAM can save 10 hours/mo per user on file search.
Learn more about stats and numbers on DAM's improvement to productivity in DAM benefits report
Multiple software integrations guarantee uninterrupted quick access to your media library from G Workspace, Adobe Suite, and more. The commenting section on each asset, meanwhile, lets you stay informed about all information that needs your attention.
Improve internal security
It’s not uncommon for a pharma company to store sensitive information that only those with proper clearance should have an access to. That is why digital asset management in pharma can be a vital addition. Using role management and restricted access you can guarantee that people who shouldn’t see or handle sensitive information don’t.
Traditional file management expects you to either create separate storage for sensitive information or use password protection for sensitive folders. The first option is a recipe for chaos. You’ll have to manage two separate storages which eat at your time and causes confusion when you upload a file to the wrong storage by mistake.
The second option, on the other hand, doesn’t guarantee complete security. Someone can leak a password or you can forget to change it when somebody leaves the company. Thus, creating extra security risks.
With DAM, you can avoid these issues before they even become such. Intelligent management of permissions guarantees that you have one single source of truth for your media assets while offering granular restrictions on viewership and management of your media library.
Key Features of Digital Asset Management Software for Pharmaceuticals
Link relevant assets together to group information
Assets rarely exist in a vacuum. Perhaps you have a promotional image for your new product and some additional copy to go along with it. Or maybe there’s some internal documentation: like your employee’s HR profile, their contract, etc.
Of course, there are many ways in which you can organize said data but in Pics.io, there’s this thing called linked assets.
As the name implies, you can select as many assets as you need and link them together. What this does is that whenever you bring up the asset’s info panel, you’ll see all linked assets there. So you can easily see and preview all assets that pertain to the same subject.
Add relevant metadata to find assets faster
Metadata management is the original reason why DAM has been created. In short, metadata is data about data. So if an image is a piece of data then the information about it (name, price of the depicted product, author of the image) is metadata.
Metadata management is the original reason why DAM has been created. In short, metadata is data about data. So if an image is a piece of data then the information about it (name, price of the depicted product, author of the image) is metadata.
Metadata is useful because it helps you find assets faster as you don’t have to rely on remembering the asset’s name. When you have hundreds (if not thousands) of them, it is too time intensive to scroll through your library to find the one you need.
After you have added metadata to your assets, you can then reduce 1000 assets to 10 by searching all assets that have NSAID keyword, for example. Using custom metadata fields, you can reduce the number even further and pinpoint the exact thing you need at the moment.
Custom metadata fields let you create data fields with information that is unique to your niche. So you can create a number field priceUSD or a “yes/no” field like isOTC to specify if these drugs can be sold over the counter or only with a prescription.
Role management to guarantee proper access to sensitive information
As I’ve mentioned before, one of the worst things that can happen with data is it ending up in the wrong hands. Not even malicious kind, mind. But maybe somebody sees something that they shouldn’t (like HR information becoming publicly accessible). Pics.io DAM has an easy way to guarantee internal confidentiality for all your assets, without a need to rely on passwords or create separate storage.
You can create roles for every media library user and then assign specific permissions to them. You get to dictate what they can do with assets, and which ones they can or cannot see. These restrictions can be as granular or as general as you’d like. You can adjust it on the global or collection (folder). So, maybe there are assets over which your marketing people need to have total control over but there are others that they shouldn’t see whatsoever.
Team management expands even to how you manage metadata of assets. Keywords are useful but they demand moderation. If everybody ends up using keywords that they believe make sense then you will soon have hundreds of synonyms and other confusing mix-ups. As the admin of your DAM, you can enable restricted vocabulary so that your teammates can only add keywords from the pre-approved list.
Easy way to share and receive content from third-parties
For sharing single assets it is as simple as clicking Share to generate a direct link to the asset. For multiples, there is a thing we call Websites. Websites let you turn entire collections of assets into interactive online branded portals in just a few minutes. By picking the default (proofing) template, people who access your Website can view and comment on assets and you would see those comments in your DAM. This makes the approval process much faster if you need some digital assets to be approved by either external or internal parties.
And to guarantee that everything is as secure as it needs to be, you can protect your websites with password authentication and include a legal consent form to make sure that your website visitors won’t misuse these assets.
Meanwhile, if you need to receive assets, you can use inboxes. Inboxes are like digital mailboxes. You send a link to someone and they can upload all assets straight to your media library. So you don’t have to rely on Dropboxes to download assets, then upload them to Pics.io and only then populate them with required metadata.
This is especially useful for something like conferences for which you’ve hired a freelancer photographer, for example. You can just ask them to take as many shots as they can and then send them over to your inbox. Thanks to thumbnails with visual previews you can then quickly decide which photos make the cut and add them to your collection where needed. Such smooth and seamless collaboration makes the approval process faster on your side, as a receiver of digital content.
Revision control for easy comparison of file versions
There is always a need to update an existing asset, perhaps to reflect new pricing for a product or just to refresh your brand’s appearance. With traditional media libraries, you end up creating 10+ different versions of the same image. Not only does it feel cluttered but there’s no way of knowing which revision of an asset ended up as the approved one.
Pics.io’s DAM for pharmaceuticals guarantees that it doesn’t happen by keeping all revisions of the same asset under one thumbnail. In the same section where you leave the comments, you can see the history of all revisions that have been uploaded along with the justification for the change. You can switch back and forth between these versions and also use visual comparison to see different versions side by side.
How Pics.io Can Help?
Pharma, like many industries in the ife sciences niche, isn’t averse to rigorous documentation and handling large volumes of data. I can bet that there is but a few companies that don’t have some form of Amazon S3 or Google Drive storage for these purposes.
We at Pics.io understand that change for the sake of it isn’t worth it. Let alone when the proposition is to switch from established tech giants (with all implied security and privacy measures) to something unknown. Which is why we are the only DAM provider on the market that offers direction integration with Amazon S3 and Google Drive both.
This means that all your assets will remain just where you want them to be. In this case, DAM will act as an “envelope” around your storage option. You’ll get all the benefits of digital assets management system with the convenience of something that you know and trust. And, of course, such integration comes at no extra charge (besides the price you end up paying for using DAM).
So, if you believe that your media library can benefit from being a lot more manageable, take Pics.io for a spin with a 7-day free trial. Or, you can always book a demo if there are some questions that this article didn’t answer. Hope to see you there ;)
Conclusion
- Digital content is an important element in pharma industry.
- It is used in marketing, sales, as well as internal documentation.
- However, with the volumes of digital media ever increasing, it can be difficult to properly store and maintain all the assets.
- Especially when it comes to sensitive information. Pharma companies often work with assets that shouldn't be seen by everyone in the organizaiton.
- Traditional media libraries, however, don't offer an elegant solution for handling sensitive information. You need to rely on creating separate storages for different types of content or on passwords.
- Both solutions can lead to chaos and even more security breaches.
- Digital asset management helps to consolidate all assets you have in one place while permission management lets directly limit who can see which assets, without relying on passwords and other half-measures.
- Metadata management, meanwhile, can improve assets discoverability and ensure that assets are never lost or misplaced.
- Pics.io is the only DAM on the market that has complete integration with Google Drive and Amazon S3 storage.
- This means that you get to keep all assets where you want them to be while enjoying all DAM benefits at no extra cost.
FAQ
How to guarantee data integrity in Pharma?
By data integrity, we mean that it's attributable, legible, original, and accurate. Ensuring all of the above can be streamlined with Digital Asset Management. DAM is a type of software that focuses on metadata management which helps with proper attribution and legibility of information. By specifying concrete metadata you can properly describe to whom the data belongs, what it describes, and more.
Features focused on the asset lifecycle and collaboration, meanwhile, can guarantee that you and your team are always on top of the data's actuality and validity.
Why do I need to care about digitalization in the pharma industry?
Digitalization of information reduces the time and effort you need to spend on managing, updating, and sharing your assets. One of the main reasons is metadata management. With physical information, you often have to rely on knowing exactly where the document is or its name. Digital asset management for pharma lets you tap into metadata with which you can easily find the required asset even if you don't know/remember its name by using relevant metadata (like descriptive keywords, author's name, etc.)
