Champion Laboratories Product PAckaging
OVERVIEW
At Champion Laboratories, one of the industry’s largest automotive filtration suppliers and manufacturer of original equipment filtration product for brands such as Luber-Finer, FRAM, Valvoline and K&N, product packaging is a high volume critical component to the finished product. With such a large product portfolio and many brands, there are thousands of unique SKU’s and hundreds of packaging die lines to adapt graphic packaging artwork to and maintain a consistent brand identity for each product line. Champion Laboratories had previously relied on outsourced firms to manage the initial packaging artwork design, design adaptation to all packaging die lines, artwork asset management and pre press artwork preparation in order to deliver production ready artwork to its packaging production resources. When I joined the team at Champion Laboratories, I began to transition this to an internally managed workflow and made a giant impact for the company.
COMPANY PAIN POINTS
Packaging Artwork Production became a bottleneck in the product implementation process due to it being outsourced and those companies managing multiple clients.
Outsourced firms had communication barriers and lead times to process changes and revisions. Revisions to artwork could take multiple days to process and resend for review and approval. Approved artwork could take days to go through pre press processing and output final files to send to packaging production partners.
Sales and marketing teams did not have an in house creative team to collaborate and conceptualize packaging artwork for upcoming product launches or rebranding.
OBJECTIVES
Transition Champion Labs from an outsourced packaging artwork workflow to bring this process in-house.
Create a packaging artwork workflow that goes through design concept, design adaptation, pre press preparation and product delivery.
Decrease outsourced packaging artwork production costs.
Decrease packaging artwork production timelines.
Create and manage artwork storage server for all legacy and future generated packaging artwork.
Improve product line design consistency through the adaptation across all packaging die lines.
Create and manage product line packaging design guidelines and standardize design assets.
THE RESULTS
OVER $2,000,000 IN COST SAVINGS
75% FASTER ARTWORK PRODUCTION
OVER 1500 SKU’S OF PRODUCTION READY ARTWORK PRODUCED YEARLY
By creating a packaging production artwork workflow from the ground up, we were able to ramp up artwork production to a completely internally managed process. This dramatically improved product implementation timelines by communicating with internal teams effectively and shortening artwork completion timelines. Once all legacy artwork was acquired and the artwork servers built and organized, brand guides and design adaptation processes were created, standardized and documented. This resulted in a much more consistent product line on the shelves at many automotive parts suppliers such as AutoZone, Advanced Auto Parts and Walmart.
The production artwork and pre press workflow was built around ESKO packaging tools for Adobe Illustrator, Utilizing the DeskPack Advanced and PowerTrapper plugins. Using both automation and comprehensive toolsets, I was able to adapt a packaging design to any provided die line, do the necessary pre press work, send and receive artwork approval and output production ready artwork within a typical day’s workflow if need be.
Due to the success of the Champion Laboratories packaging artwork workflow, our process was adapted to other acquired business units across our parent organizations portfolio. I helped train international team members to use our processes and workflows, resulting in a 300% increase in productivity for the company’s packaging artwork production workflow.
