Asset Processing

Roles / Involvement: 

• Information Architecture
• Process Design
• Project Management
• Quality Assurance

A Fortune 500 company was looking for a more efficient way to process thousands of PDF and image assets for their online catalog app. The existing method involved painstaking hours of tedious manual labor: adjusting PDF settings, adding metadata, renaming files and re-sizing images.

I was contracted to study the process and develop effective strategies to simplify the workflow. My responsibilities also included weekly client communications, vendor training and conducting quality assurance tests on the image assets.

The first big win resulted from the design and construction of a writer-bot that could process a batch of PDFs with a single click. However, our image processing vendor was losing a lot of time searching for, renaming and sorting assets. Furthermore, unusable files were a point of frustration for everyone because they also bottle-necked the FTP and QA processes.

It was necessary to simplify the vendor’s path by delivering only the assets that could be processed. This was accomplished by convincing the customers to adopt a unified asset spreadsheet template and creating a second minibot named Hummingbird. Designed for the client, Hummingbird renamed assets and removed unusable files from the batches before they were handed off. It also pre-sorted the images based upon their dimensions, which further streamlined the vendor’s path.

Through effective project management and two strategically placed tools, we were able to process over 150,000 image and PDF assets for our client at less than half of their production costs.