Kristina Huddart, a leading digital asset management (DAM) consultant, offers a prime example of how to use the right data and mindset to create real change: “I was working with a FTSE 100 company, looking at their in-house creative agency’s process for event photography.

“I mapped out the current workflow that they had, and it was about 40 steps. A lot of those steps were ‘call this person’ or ‘manually download these photographs and upload them somewhere else’. By really analysing it, we managed to get those 40 steps down to just ten, which was an incredible streamlining of process,” says Huddart.

The agency challenge 

Huddart was speaking in Canto’s latest From Chaos to Control video podcast, a series which offers actionable insights from industry experts on creating an operationally resilient agency. 

If you’re a creative agency owner or director, you hardly need reminding of the challenges faced by agencies: you need to move at pace, meet tight deadlines, and service multiple clients, all while dealing with frustratingly low optimisation, clunky tech workarounds, and staff churn. Let’s face it — low-key chaos is the vibe of the day.

As Huddart points out, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution: “The root causes of the challenges that we see come from multiple areas. Often this is referred to as a golden triangle, but I think of it more as a golden square: people, process, technology, and also data.”

What links all of these elements together is workflow. Get your workflow right and you start to see more effective operations, get it wrong and chaos reigns.

“How those elements are interconnected, and the role they play in the overall efficiency picture, are very important,” adds Canto’s podcast host and Growth Marketing Manager, Roxanne Lewington.

So, how can agencies create more effective workflows and realise some much-needed operational efficiency?

Take a holistic view

As you might have noticed from Huddart’s example earlier, the answer to agency efficiency comes from taking a more holistic view. It’s not about adding more tools to your tech stack or more meetings to your diary, but interrogating where the waste happens and backing up your assumptions with data.

Huddart explains that it’s often manual, administrative tasks which take up a sneaky amount of time: “Bringing in the right technology in the right places during the process really alleviates those manual steps. Then you’re not picking up the phone, or sharing a Word document by email, or trying to consolidate forty different reviews of a document.”

For instance, creatives often spend hours every week searching through folders to find assets that already exist. Instead, using features like Canto’s AI Visual Search you can instantly find the right image or video in your library using natural language. 

Standardise your workflow

Instead of letting those manual tasks pile up, Huddart recommends standardising and automating processes as much as possible.

“That can sound boring,” she admits, “and for creatives hearing the word standardised is probably pretty awful, but actually standardising workflows means creatives can actually be more creative because they’re not thinking about what the next step is, or wondering if they’ve skipped a step.”

Having those processes established is particularly crucial when your agency is scaling. “It really helps being able to onboard new team members and say: ‘Here are the five steps that we go through for every single project’,” explains Huddart.

Embed the top tools

Finally, Huddart recommends finding the right tools to help align your people, data, processes, and technology.

“I heard recently that most organisations use between 20 and 40 tools in their typical creative operations workflow, which is absolutely wild. So, it’s really important to remember that you need to connect up those tools,” she says.

With tech stacks so tall they could topple any day, how can agencies choose and optimise the right tools for them? One of the most effective ways to standardise and integrate your tools is through a digital asset management (DAM) system. Huddart explains why: “I wholeheartedly feel that DAM is so important to have as a bedrock foundation to any creative operations and operational efficiency. 

“The ability to centralise, store and manage all your content in one place is so important because you can find the content easily, reuse and repurpose it, and create more value from it.”

So, is your agency inefficient? Follow these tips and your answer could be: not anymore.

Canto is an industry-leading digital asset management (DAM) solution, pioneering the way with innovative technology to help companies work smarter, smoother, and faster. For more tips, watch Canto’s From Chaos to Control podcast series.