MADISON, WI--(Marketwired - February 13, 2017) - Widen Enterprises today announced the launch of Workflow, an online proofing and work management solution. The company introduced Workflow with Widen Collective v11, the latest version of Widen's digital asset management (DAM) system. Workflow takes teams from idea to DAM, circumventing the usual roadblocks, communications gaps, and breakdowns.
Creative operations management can be a messy affair with little visibility. Creative, marketing, and product teams typically have to manage their workloads, deadlines, and review and approval processes with distracting email chains. Under such conditions, effectiveness can unravel as teams have to invest more time in managing the process and less time in executing the work.
Workflow addresses these problems with a central, automated tool for online proofing and work management. With Workflow, teams can:
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Plan, request, schedule, route, proof, and measure project work
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Collaborate in one place throughout the entire lifecycle of a project
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Automate review and approval tasks with multi-stage workflows
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Annotate creative work and design files
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Document work processes and keep an audit trail of comments and changes
The key to Workflow is that it adapts to any creative lifecycle. For example, let's say a marketing team has struggled to produce graphics for the sales team. With Workflow, marketing could create a request form for sales that funnels new projects into the Workflow planning tool. When the sales director submits a request, the marketing manager can assign the work to a designer and create a timeline of deliverables in the scheduling tool. Everyone involved in the project can see the status of the design in real time -- there are no mysteries or time-sucking email chains about who needs to do what.
Organized from the get go, the designer can produce the new graphic and route it to colleagues for review, comments, and approval. The online proofing system ensures that each reviewer sees the previous versions and comments. That way, the designer doesn't have to redo the work or get caught in a creative tug-of-war between the sales director and marketing manager. Once the final reviewer approves, Workflow can load the image into DAM, where sales can access it at will.
"When work management becomes too burdensome and opaque, teams lose time, miss deadlines, and clash," said Bob Samuels, Workflow Product Manager at Widen. "We created Workflow to help organizations make the most of limited resources and talent. Workflow is like an extra team member who handles tedious organizational tasks so you can focus on collaboration and quality work."