X-Rite and Pantone, along with MediaBeacon, Esko, and AVT have released a white paper called The Digital Maturity Model for Brand Packaging, highlighting the levels of digitisation within the brand packaging process.
The paper’s authors say that consumer packaged goods companies experience continued pressure to produce new and more products quickly. This forces them to assess the current capacity and capabilities of their consumer packaging processes, including packaging workflow, colour management, digital printing and coding. Senior leadership at many of these companies adopt digital technologies and implement digital automation to cultivate packaging as a core business capability.
Cindy Cooperman, global director for brand and packaging at X-Rite, says, “Brands understand the benefits of streamlining processes in order to increase speed to market for their products. Our digital maturity model allows consumer packagin goods brands to identify their current capability level in developing packaging. It’s also a valuable framework for defining the future strategies, processes, and digital tools required to more effectively address colour requirements, drive revenue and improve operational efficiencies across the packaging value chain.”
The Digital Maturity Model for Brand Packaging defines five levels of maturity: Reactive, Organized, Digitized, Connected, and Intelligent. The white paper describes each of the five stages as well as 14 dimensions that comprise the maturity levels. For each level, it has descriptions of what motivates a business to level-up their capabilities.
It lists the five main levels of the maturity model as: Reactive, manual, offline tasks and processes are triggered by external pressures; Organised, tasks are triggered for established stakeholders by defined processes, timelines and physical quality measures using basic computerised tools; Digitised, projects, tasks and processes are increasingly completed and measured digitally using configured hardware and software; Connected, packaging software and hardware is continuously integrated with other business processes and systems of record; and Intelligent, an integrated ecosystem of full product information and imagery automatically improves and synchronises across internal and external interfaces.
Adrián Fernández, general manager of Pantone, says, “Many brands identify with aspects from multiple stages of the maturity model, and that’s okay,
“Our hope is that the model provides these companies a framework to simplify their processes and raise the level of conversation and cross-collaboration between departments such as design, marketing and package printers, while suggesting specific ways to take current processes to the next level.”
Click here to read more about the model
