Saks is a retail leader in luxury e-commerce, known for exceptional online shopping and personalized experiences. Faced with escalating demand for content creation on tight timelines, Kimberly Jauss, Director of Creative Imaging at Saks, and her dedicated team led the implementation of Saks’ first Digital Asset Management (DAM) system. 

The goal of the DAM was to centralize assets across the organization and automate critical aspects of Saks’ creative process. Before Tenovos, Saks’ creative teams navigated challenges like rogue asset storage, fragmented and timely review processes, and a lack of clarity surrounding asset permissions. These challenges curtailed the creative team’s productivity and made content reuse next to impossible.

Today, with Tenovos, Saks has achieved centralized asset management, enabling enhanced content discoverability and subsequently increased content reuse. Leveraging workflow automation and integrations within the DAM, Saks has streamlined their creative processes and instilled robust governance across the board. These capabilities have translated into seamless version control, simplified internal and external collaborations, and secure yet visible content sharing across teams.

Before Tenovos, Saks’ assets were being stored across various sources, including physical hard drives, personal desktops, and Adobe InDesign. Folder structures were extremely difficult to navigate. With thousands of assets, this lack of centralization made searching for content – and knowing if teams had permission to use that content – incredibly time-consuming. Another issue was version confusion; for instance, changes made to a product shot in one file were not reflected in others, and teams were left scrambling to find the correct version when it came time to print or publish.

With Tenovos, Saks’ teams can access assets seamlessly in the cloud-based DAM with an intelligent search engine powered by metadata. The arduous task of navigating complex folder structures has been replaced with the ability to curate collections of assets organized by a common theme, such as brand, campaign, product line, or SKUs. Asset data, including rights and usage permissions, can be found alongside assets, eliminating the need to chase team members for approval. Ultimately, this centralization and intuitive search enables Saks’ teams to swiftly locate the assets they need, enhancing efficiency and reducing the risk of using outdated or incorrect versions.

Key features:

• Story Management
  (content organization, curation, search, and governance)
• Rights Management
• Cloud-based architecture powered by AWS

Previously, Saks grappled with the complexity of sharing content effectively to both their internal teams and external partners, such as brands. When sharing content internally, the risk of content misuse and the need for controlled access to assets were pressing concerns due to confidentiality surrounding specific brands and campaigns. However, Saks wanted to give their teams enough visibility to avoid duplicative work. As Saks sells numerous brands on their website, they also needed to ensure these brands have the ability to view and approve content through an efficient process.

Tenovos is a game-changer in facilitating the secure, seamless sharing of assets – the ability to set user permissions in the DAM enables Saks to provide asset visibility to their internal teams while maintaining control over who can view and share assets. Being able to share what has been created securely has curtailed duplicated efforts and significantly reduced the risk of content misuse.

Tenovos also empowers Saks to provide external teams (like brands) access and visibility into the DAM, so these external teams can participate in the creative process (i.e. proofing and markups) and ultimately approve the content for publishing. The ability for external teams to participate in Saks’ creative process creates confidence that Saks is upholding brand consistency and simplifies workflows for Saks’ teams, as they can review and edit assets for internal and external teams in a unified manner. Controlled sharing ultimately enhances productivity as eliminating the need for teams to adapt to multiple approval workflows means Saks can get brand-approved content to market as fast as possible.

Key features:

• Story Orchestration
  (creative reviews and approvals, proofing, rights management)
• User Roles & Configurations
• Secure Content Distribution
  
• Creative Reviews & Proofing

Saks needed a DAM that could integrate directly with their Product Information Management (PIM) system to ensure up-to-date product information was connected with corresponding creative assets. Without synchronization between the PIM and content library, all data had to be added to assets by teams manually, and pulling assets for out-of-date products or vendors was a nightmare, as assets were incredibly difficult to locate.

Now, with Tenovos’ PIM framework within the DAM, data syncs directly from Saks’ PIM into their DAM. Product information is thus available and searchable in the DAM, allowing teams to search for specific vendors, styles, SKUs, or products and locate the corresponding assets quickly. Saks’ teams can also publish these assets to their CMS with speed and at scale, significantly boosting productivity. Further, this improved content discoverability relating to products is especially beneficial for pulling assets off channels at speed when they can no longer be used.

Key features:

• PIM Integration & Framework
  (house PIM data in DAM)
• Mass Ingestion/Upload
• Integrated Tech Ecosystem
• Configurable Metadata