Establishing A Service Culture For Your Labeling and Artwork

In my last article, I looked at the types of packaging labeling and artwork errors which occur and their causes.  We will now start to explore some of the capabilities required to deliver artwork right the first time, and I will start this by focusing on the need to establish a service focus for your labeling and artwork teams.

Service Culture

The development of packaging labelling and artwork involves many different groups across the company and, more often than not, external service providers and supply-chain partners.

As we have already discussed, the creation of artwork requires many elements of information to be drawn together in a way that ensures that every detail is correct in the end result. Without careful orchestration, the separate groups – both within and external to the company – involved in the artwork creation process will not deliver artwork of the required quality standard. Each person involved in the process must perform their task in the process in the correct sequence, using the right information and tools in order to achieve a quality result.

To facilitate this, it is beneficial to consider the provision of labelling text and artwork as a business service. In our experience, the best artwork capabilities are those that consider them to be providing a service to the key business stakeholders and strive to understand their service role and deliver it. Like any service offering, this will evolve over time as the customer’s needs change. The management of the artwork capability should recognize these changes and adapt the service accordingly in a managed and considered way.

The development of a clear mission, vision and performance measures can go a long way to orchestrate the successful delivery of the service across the diverse groups that are involved

Defining service requirements

When designing an artwork service, we have found it useful to take a systematic approach to the definition of the service requirement based on a number of key questions which we discuss in more detail in our book.

• What is the service producing?
• What is the scope of the service?
• Who are the customers?
• How do you measure success?
• What do you need the service to achieve?
• Who “owns” the service?
• Who is involved in the service?