As someone with extensive experience of delivering transformation and change in both financial services and life sciences, I recognize many parallels in the challenges and opportunities facing both industries. Both markets are heavily regulated and traditionally conservative in their approach to modernization, for example, yet both are being disrupted and are facing pressure to deliver improved productivity, speed of turnaround, and cost efficiency.

Therefore, change is imperative. Banking has come a long way here; what were once long-winded processes around opening a new account or setting up regular payments can now be managed simply, speedily and securely from a handheld device. But the life sciences industry, and indeed many other strictly-regulated markets, could also benefit significantly from equivalent innovation.

Take the current complexities of global product labeling. Why shouldn’t these be reduced to more coordinated, streamlined and automated processes — those that can be tracked and managed via a handheld device — even on the daily commute, in some instances? Right across the label creation process and out to labeling approval and even distribution, including that of electronic/online information for patients, there is enormous scope to do things in new and better ways.

Your 2020 Priority Needs to Be User-Oriented Improvement

If the life sciences industry is serious about delivering a more user-centric experience, not just in look and feel but in teams’ ability to execute their duties more intuitively and easily, a more app-oriented user experience could be a real game-changer. The problem is that true user-centricity remains the exception rather than the rule in many aspects of business, with regulations and internal system requirements more likely to dictate any improvements to the way things are done. In turn, this compromises the potential for impactful transformation.

However, with the right coordination and controls behind the scenes, app-driven labeling management could genuinely empower label creators, approvers and distributors to complete their work far more spontaneously, effectively and immediately. This could include everything from quickly determining precisely which mandatory elements need to appear on a label to instantly calculating how the impact of any changes of circumstance might cascade across global operations — even all the way out to visualizing finished output, assessing exceptions, and processing approvals on the go.

If brands, in no matter what sector, really want to push boundaries, drive progress, and accelerate time to market, with so much now digitally possible, enterprises really ought to make user-oriented improvements a priority in 2020.

The best starting point: being willing to view and do things differently.

Want to know more?

Whether you’re in the food and beverage, pharmaceutical, medical device, chemical, or even the cosmetic industry, our experts are ready to help you transform your labeling and artwork management with the help of our innovative software, leading the way in the labeling and artwork software space. Get in touch today to see what we can do for you at enquiries@kallik.com or call +44 (0) 1827 318100.

In pharma, labeling change management is a notoriously complex affair already. It’s made more challenging because the physical labels tend to be handled by regulatory teams and manufacturing, and the art work by design teams, usually at third-party agencies. None of this is very well coordinated, and it can be very difficult to see the current status of output, the likely impact of planned changes, and what will be involved to roll them out wherever they are needed.

By contrast, in medical device manufacture adherence to engineering principles sees labeling treated as an assembly line involving known modular content elements — effectively a ‘bill of materials,’ whether output is physical or digital. From the carton and Instructions for Use (IFU) insert to the packing box with its own barcode and even online patient information, all are layers of the same process and are managed in a coordinated, systematic way. And I think the pharmaceutical industry could learn a lot from medical device manufacturers about effective enterprise labeling change management across the lifecycle of products.

No Single Source of Truth

Fragmentation — a ‘single source of labeling truth’ within the global organization — has made it difficult for pharmaceutical brands to manage the integrity of labeling on a broad scale. It’s also hampered any meaningful process automation around global labeling management which, in turn, has contributed to the complexities, cost and risk that so many international pharmaceutical organizations still experience. By contrast, the medical device industry, which has come relatively late to the level of regulatory rigor experienced by other life sciences disciplines, has not grown up with this same legacy of information/content silos. Medical device manufacture is a discrete, engineering-based industry based on assembling finished products from pre-built and vetted components, rather than a process-based industry working with less tangible formulations (5mg of this substance, 2mg of another, etc.) assembled in a distant laboratory.

This differing perspective stands medical device companies in good stead to manage regulated labeling content systematically and efficiently on a global scale, as new requirements come into play, including the EU Medical Device Regulation, Unique Device Identification (UDI) in the US, and global product serialization. Why? Because device manufacturers are already thinking instinctively in terms of a single source of truth for labeling and artwork management, allied to an ability to hold approved compliant text, symbols and branding elements at a reusable component level. This is in stark contrast to pharma organizations who are still drawing from single-use documents, and manually copying and pasting content into designated label formats. It gives them an agility and real-time responsiveness that pharmaceutical companies can only dream of.

What this looks like in practice: instead of capturing correct text and artwork manually each time a new need or labeling change arises, a process requiring rounds of approvals each time), device manufacturers are able to create labeling on demand, calling up already-approved content elements from an enterprise label library according to specified parameters or rules. This paves the way for smart automation: the ability to assemble new or updated labels in real time, without having to call up the artwork studio, or set in motion new rounds of content review and approval. The reality is that, although end-stage human checks should still be applied, 98%of label preparation can be automated, so that if X device is being assembled for Y market the label creation process ‘knows’ to call up elements A, B and C.

Re-Orienting Our Approach to Labeling

The ideal scenario is a write-once/read-many approach, where approved master content becomes the definitive source of everything that follows, and becomes the only point where fundamental content component editing takes place. The ‘component’ part is important here: these master labeling assets are not single, fixed entities — but rather a series of interconnected building blocks, or modules, which can be reassembled ad infinitum for different purposes and for different countries and contexts. And users of this approach report a 10-fold acceleration in the speed of identifying and editing affected labels when a change to content is required, transforming a process that might have consumed weeks across thousands of labels into something that can be executed in seconds.

For too long in pharma, labeling has not been treated as critical to continued marketing authorization, brand perception, market confidence, and patient safety. A look to how medical device manufacturers approach and hone their own labeling practices in response to new industry demands can serve as a useful reference point as the sector works to re-orient its approach here.

Want to know more?

Whether you’re in the food and beverage, pharmaceutical, medical device, chemical, or even the cosmetic industry, our experts are ready to help you transform your labeling and artwork management with the help of our innovative software, leading the way in the labeling and artwork software space. Get in touch today to see what we can do for you at enquiries@kallik.com or call +44 (0) 1827 318100.

The UK has just over 8,000 ventilators, significantly fewer than the 30,000 the government estimates are needed to cope with the fallout from the peak of the Coronavirus epidemic. Clearly, the race is on for medical ventilator specialist manufacturers to ramp up production.

Manufacturers are being asked to close the gap, with firms like Dyson, Airbus, GKN, Rolls Royce, Megitt and others working on partnering with medical device manufacturers on new designs to meet the huge and unprecedented demand for the units.

But the danger is that these new entrants, very welcome as they are, may struggle with a key process: getting the product and package labeling elements correct and aligned with NHS needs.

And the inability to prove the required level of clinical evidence and correct labeling will ultimately prevent the new ventilators from getting to the NHS staff who need them in a timely manner, and time is of the essence.

What we can do as a supplier is to offer our expertise on this aspect. That’s because we have accumulated a great deal of experience in the medical device manufacturing space. We’ve helped our customers deal not just with national/international requirements, but the large amount of required text and graphics that must now be featured on individual labeling.

Based on our exposure to these issues, there are a number of practical measures you can take, in order to help you mount the quick and effective response to the current crisis required and get the new machines into the NHS in a timely, safe and acceptable manner. These are:

• Ensure that you are aware of the Government’s new regulatory exemptions as it relates to medical device manufacture during the current situation.The FDA has also updated their policy based on the current COVID-19 situation.
• Get up to date on which regulations you still need to comply with, namely EU Medical Device Regulation (MDR), US Unique Device Identification (UDI), and global product serialisation — but note that the former, which is formally due to take effect from 26 May 2020, may well be delayed, as the medical technology industry is lobbying for it to be postponed. This is a fast changing area, but we can help here, e.g. share current legislation information, best practice, and provide advice on how to navigate the rules with you if you’re not familiar with them.
• Leave nothing to chance. To meet the tough deadlines and ensure nothing derails your manufacturing schedule, introduce a Corrective/Preventative Action process (CAPA) to quickly identify any potential non-conformity or issue to quickly respond to issues wherever and whenever they might occur to assure the problem can never be experienced again.

Kallik is working hard to ensure that all of our customers are able to continue to perform their essential labeling and artwork management processes during this uncertain time. If you are looking to take new ventilators or other medical devices to market faster during this time by automating your labeling lifecycle, Kallik can get you up in running in weeks, not months. 

We are also proud to be a UK listed supplier, helping the public sector during the coronavirus COVID-19 outbreak.

Stay safe and we will get through this together. 

Want to know more?

Whether you’re in the food and beverage, pharmaceutical, medical device, chemical, or even the cosmetic industry, our experts are ready to help you transform your labeling and artwork management with the help of our innovative software, leading the way in the labeling and artwork software space. Get in touch today to see what we can do for you at enquiries@kallik.com or call +44 (0) 1827 318100.

A persistent challenge in highly regulated industries is getting the right label on the right product at the right time. Ever-changing regulations can make this a long and arduous task, particularly when these companies maintain the usage of outdated manual labeling and artwork management processes. It is clear that the introduction of an automated system can provide value, but the question is: how?

A quick thought experiment...

Consider a designer taking 30 minutes to create a label at $40 an hour. 1000 labels would cost $20,000 to produce conventionally. Not only can Automated Artwork Generation save $1000’s by producing labels quickly and automatically, it will get it right the first time too. This is a great advantage when it comes to responding to regulatory changes, making label changes a much more straight-forward, clean process. Furthermore, this method vastly minimises the risk of recalls, which can incur massive costs in high-stakes industries. In fact, we’ve found that in the case of many of our customers, automation has allowed organisations to reach an average label and artwork generation time of well under 60 seconds.

Real-life results

Throughout 2020, we at Kallik were able to capture highly impressive Veraciti™ user data. User data improved as the year went on, as a result of continuous development in Veraciti™ tools and technology. This, in combination with our release of Project Brief Manager 3, has allowed us to achieve spectacular results, such as a 50% reduction in project completion time at a major life science company. The very same tools and technology that delivered this incredible reduction simultaneously handled a 27% increase in the number of labels or artworks being generated by Veraciti™.

Of course, the migration of our solution to AWS has also been paramount in maximising these benefits. The added speed and security which the AWS cloud provides has aided our customers in countless ways, with enhanced resilience, full compliance with ISO/IEC standards, GxP requirements and data privacy, these benefits have had a knock-on effect.

Through the adoption of our automated platform, a leading medical device company can now process a typical monthly workload of over 8,000 artwork creation jobs at an average rate of one job per 37 seconds, in turn cutting average label and artwork project completion time from 52 to just 26 days. A major chemical company, meanwhile, has seen artwork generation times slashed by 75% over a four-month period to an average of just 12 seconds per artwork generation, with another in the oil & lubricants sector reaching just 3 seconds per task.

Innovative automated artwork and label management is the way forward

Organisations in highly regulated industries who are adopting automated artwork and label generation in favour of using manual processes or outsourcing design work to third parties are seeing major time and cost reductions. Through further investment and innovation, we hope that our Veraciti™ statistics will reflect these advantages even further as 2021 progresses. We are committed to providing our customers with optimal efficiency and results.

Beyond helping companies in highly regulated industries get to grips with disparate labelling and artwork processes, our findings also demonstrate the benefits of automation scale over time and as organisations grow their operations. Many of these organisations have traditionally employed third-party designers to create and amend artwork and labels to great expense, with these assets numbering in the thousands. The cost efficiencies for bringing these operations in-house and introducing automation are clear.

Automation has a critical role to play for industries such as medical devices, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, cosmetics and food & beverages, where regulations are tight and mistakes can have serious effects on brand reputation or consumer health. 

As we have seen with the rush to comply with EU Medical Device Regulations and the potential regulatory shifts of a prospective Brexit deal, the agility and centralised control of a dedicated artwork and label management solution has become a necessity for businesses rather than simply a nice thing to have; automation is the future of efficient and reliable label and artwork management.

Of course, your first question might be: what is digital maturity? When we talk about digital maturity, we’re talking about how your business operates. So what does it mean for your business to be digitally mature? A digitally mature business is one which moves its operations from manual processes to digital, automated processes. We’re going to talk about it in the context of what we know best: the labeling and artwork management (LAM) process. After all, when it comes to LAM, digitization is crucial - particularly for medical device manufacturers.

Until recently, labeling had seldom been seen as its own discipline. However, with the recent implementation of EU MDR and upcoming IVDR deadlines, medical device organizations are now realizing that digitalization of the labeling process must occur in order to remain compliant. Manual processes have become too time consuming and prone to human error, and up to a third of medical device organizations have unfortunately learned the hard way that regulatory deadlines are simply no longer achievable using traditional methods.

Six steps your business can take to become more digitally mature (and why you should take them)

Whatever the size of your business, becoming more digitally mature comes with countless benefits. We’ve broken down the process of digitizing your LAM to just six key steps:

1. Consolidate

Label data is often held in varying systems across the business, but it is crucial that data such as phrases, translations, and symbols are all easily accessible for seamless label transitions in the event of regulatory changes. Subsequently, each of these components need to be consolidated into one centralized, digital source of truth. Albeit time consuming, this is an essential step towards digital maturity - little technological deployment or integration can occur without it.

2. Structure

Once all of your label data has been consolidated, your business can switch to a centralized digital system with structured and controlled datasets. Having this ‘single source of truth’ allows for the scaling up of further features and integrations, boosting the efficiency of your business. Approval workflows can then be implemented for updates to datasets and traceability on a global scale can be considered to ensure the consistency of label content. This structured approach can also help to drive the reuse of label data.

3. Exploit

With all assets in a central repository, your business will then be able to exploit this data to achieve complete regulatory compliance. This is of critical importance in the medical device industry with the MDR and IVDR changes occurring over this decade. For multinational organizations, this can be duplicated on a global scale by pre-approving compliant assets to be reused in all geographical locations.

4. Automate

With this library of pre-approved assets, labels and artwork can then be automatically generated using the right software, cutting creation times from days or hours to mere seconds. This comes with vast cost reductions, as well as increased speed to market, often eliminating the requirement for third-party design agencies. Bottlenecks and the risk of human error are also eradicated as pre-approval ensures that automatically generated content is compliant.

5. Distribute

At this stage, all assets are now suitable for publication. Distribution of the final approved label or artwork must now be controlled effectively, with traceability of the entire process. From basic black and white shipping labels to a pre-press ready file being sent to a third-party printer, labels and artworks should be firmly linked with upstream creation and approval processes.

6. Insight

This centralized solution and its associated capabilities lay the foundation for new high-level business insights, enabling medical device manufacturers to refine business processes. As a result, data can be analyzed and actioned, and you can improve the upstream process to optimize your ROI.

For further information on how to implement these 6 key steps, you can read our digital maturity white paper here.

So why is it essential?

The benefits speak for themselves, but it’s not just a choice, it’s a necessity. Centralizing all of your data provides a level of ease of access that can save months of company time. Label alterations as a result of changing regulations go from mass projects to relatively easy tasks the further you climb the digital maturity ladder. From this central hub of assets, labels and artworks can then be automated. 

Automation rapidly reduces time-to-market, with project completion time going from months or years to a matter of days. This is crucial following the era of COVID-19, where products need to be approved and available on the market as quickly as possible, without compromising on safety. 

In the medical device industry, regulatory compliance is therefore non-negotiable. The consequences of errors in labels or IFUs can include costly recalls and, on the more extreme end, endangerment of patient safety. It is vital for brand reputation that these risks are minimized. 

Pre-approval of assets ensures that compliance is seamlessly achieved. Traceability is also integral, which is far more easily achieved with the connected approach that digitizing your LAM provides. 

Finally, this process enables intelligent business insights to further optimize your business operations. Medical device manufacturers simply cannot afford to miss out on this.

Imagine a single, cloud-based LAM solution that can achieve all of these things. At Kallik, we don’t have to! Our software, Veraciti™ is an end-to-end solution that enables you to manage all of your label and artwork data from one central location. Here are just a few of our key features:

  -  Data migration services
  -  Centralized asset and phrase management for all label and artwork data
  -  Automated and semi-automated artwork generation
  -  Secure AWS cloud access 24/7
  -  Approval workflows and pre-approval of assets
  -  End-to-end auditing
  -  Comprehensive business intelligence and reporting

Want to know more?

Whether you’re in the food and beverage, pharmaceutical, medical device, chemical, or even the cosmetic industry, our experts are ready to help you transform your labeling and artwork management with the help of our innovative software, leading the way in the labeling and artwork software space. Get in touch today to see what we can do for you at enquiries@kallik.com or call +44 (0) 1827 318100.

On our twentieth birthday, we look back at the key milestones in Kallik’s history, a company always pushing the digital boundaries on its path from spin-off to recognition as a market leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant.

Since joining Kallik in 2019, I’ve had the privilege of leading an ambitious, forward-looking team that continues to innovate and advance the conversation on how digital solutions can reshape the way companies in highly regulated industries do business. Kallik today has a truly international customer base with over 3,500 users, all benefiting from unrivalled agility, transparency and process efficiency.

Amid all of the global disruption experienced over the past two years, Kallik has gone from strength to strength as a business, accelerating global implementations of our flagship Veraciti™ solution and pushing ahead with our transformative product development pathway that meets the compliance needs of industries in an increasingly regulated world.

So where did it all begin? Our roots lie 20 years ago in digital asset management – a buzzword in the industry now but not when Kallik set out on its journey. We’ve come a long way since those pioneering days to firmly establish ourselves as a leading player in the global label and artwork management market.

Join us on our journey, values and key milestones to date:

Asset designers turned asset managers

Kallik was founded in 2001 by Neil Gleghorn, as a spin-off from an established digital origination company, The Box Room. Our target was to address the business challenge of cumbersome manual processes for building labels and artworks, with marketers, designers and product teams all involved as key stakeholders.

The team looked to develop a digital solution entirely in-house. The first iteration of Kallik’s artwork management software was designed to handle approval, workflow and asset management, based on pain-points and requirements laid out by a key international customer operating in regulated industries.

The solution immediately showed business benefits, providing a significant reduction in the volume of manually handled assets, cutting cost and complexity while enhancing management capabilities for all stakeholders.

Kallik soon became aware that a single centralised solution, further enhanced with digital capabilities, could fundamentally change the way businesses handle label and artwork management.

Addressing a critical capability gap with pioneering technology

One of the biggest label and artwork management challenges experienced by companies is the level of disconnect between teams, data and operations. Packaging such as leaflets and cartons, for example, is often managed separately to labeling, which can create a disjointed review, version control and management process. Move to the end of the value chain, and the factory print process is even more disconnected and heavily reliant on manual operations.

Enter Kallik...

Our Veraciti platform is unique. Within a single solution, Kallik can manage labels and packaging, extending all the way through to the factory print process. As the solution developed, we were committed to enhancing the capabilities of the original platform, to the point that now Kallik leads the way in leveraging automation and rules-based decision-making to cut manual processes and the risk of human errors being introduced.

Our solution Veraciti has emerged as a field leading, tried-and-tested platform for ensuring compliance in highly regulated industries from chemicals through to cosmetics, satisfying industry legislation to safeguard reputations, consumer confidence and the bottom line.

A customer-focused ethos

The customer has always been key in our development. Our collaborative approach to implementation – working closely with customers throughout the process, from data discovery and migration through to system integration – is a key pillar of maintaining our high levels of customer satisfaction, routinely referenced by our customers in industry reviews.

In the highly sensitive and regulated markets we work in, this level of collaboration and partnership has been instrumental to our significant successes in for example the medical device market, helping global manufacturers beat tight deadlines to comply with landmark industry regulations such as EU MDR and IVDR.

Accelerating growth with ambitious investment partners

The acquisition by FPE Capital in 2019 has provided the power to further accelerate our growth trajectory. Working with FPE Capital has allowed the company to significantly scale up operations and solution development, recruit technical, customer service and leadership talent and expand rapidly into new geographies and industries.

This ambitious growth strategy and intensified focus on technology innovation and customer service has reaped early dividends, with the Kallik customer base growing 35% since acquisition and a significant double-digit growth in revenue, as businesses worldwide realise the benefits of digitising their operations.

Today, Kallik boasts a global engineering and service capability and experienced senior leadership team, driving the global expansion of the tried-and-tested Veraciti solution to new heights.

Ahead of the game with cloud – from a luxury to ‘must have’ foundation

Cloud has always been at the heart of our founder’s vision for Veraciti and Kallik services – providing ease of accessibility, high service availability and rigorous data security.

Kallik has been significantly ahead of the curve in delivering solutions via the cloud – originally offering a private cloud solution at a time when this was unheard of, before migrating to an established cloud host.

Our cloud-based offerings have been further strengthened by our full migration to AWS in 2020, becoming the first solution provider in the market to do so. This AWS shift means we can today offer our entire global customer base the gold standard of secure, compliant and highly available cloud services.

Roadmap to the future – pushing the boundaries with AI and ML

Looking beyond cloud, Kallik has always led the charge for adopting disruptive and emerging technologies to transform label and artwork management operations. Veraciti was one of the first solutions in the market to provide a truly end-to-end solution, using automation to ease the burden of slow, repetitive manual processes that consumed disproportionate amounts of resources and capacity.

Our roadmap for the future incorporates advanced technologies such as AI and Machine Learning, combined with an extension of our existing automation capabilities – adding further value to customer operations beyond the sustained cost savings, agility and compliance enjoyed today.

We have a firm development pathway to further establish Veraciti as a turnkey solution capable of supporting global businesses in industries spanning food & beverage, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals and beyond.

What lies ahead?

With Gartner industry recognition for enterprise labeling, e-labeling and artwork management also landing in our twentieth birthday year, the future is bright for Kallik as we continue to help businesses reach digital maturity in label and artwork management. We’ve come a long way from our roots – but the best is still to come.

Want to learn more about how we’re helping leading companies transform and future-proof their global label and artwork management? Download our complimentary ‘Digital Maturity Curve’ white paper, or find out more about the capabilities of our flagship Veraciti solution.

Want to know more?

Whether you’re in the food and beverage, pharmaceutical, medical device, chemical, or even the cosmetic industry, our experts are ready to help you transform your labeling and artwork management with the help of our innovative software, leading the way in the labeling and artwork software space. Get in touch today to see what we can do for you at enquiries@kallik.com or call +44 (0) 1827 318100.

For too long, professionals in the manufacturing industry have had to cope with software applications that are designed more for function than usability despite the fact that it is people who are the ones using these solutions in their everyday work lives. From the shop floor and production, to packaging and distribution, the easier and more accessible the solution, the more likely business benefits will accrue. This is particularly relevant for manufacturing businesses in highly regulated industries where mistakes can result in huge fines and brand damage.

At last, the development of engaging user interfaces (UIs) commonplace in consumer applications is coming to manufacturing with the development of a new generation of intuitive UI-designed software applications, from shop floor through to packaging and labelling. Gurdip Singh, CEO at Kallik, argues that prioritising user experience (UX) and the use of intuitive software applications will be crucial in highly regulated manufacturing industries to ensure compliance with the ever growing rules and regulations, all the way through to the label.

Software companies have severely underestimated the needs of label and artwork professionals for sophisticated ways to use solutions, particularly in regulated industries where mistakes can mean fines and damaging recalls. We have all become accustomed to high quality UX in our everyday lives, with intuitive and engaging UI enabling consumers to perform tasks from booking a car service to high-level transactions such as autonomous online banking. This expectation has now reached the manufacturing industry, where label and artwork professionals need the same level of ease of use and convenience from their industrial software as their personal applications.

The label has the power to make or break a business

UX is no small matter. The IEEE reports three of the main reasons for software failure are directly related to UX. The usability of an industrial software application that manufacturing and labelling and artwork professionals have to use every day to do their jobs, has a deep impact that stretches across entire operations from design and production through to distribution and can even influence overall business performance.

First and foremost, poor UX has a significant impact on productivity. If software applications are too complex and are difficult to navigate, this will significantly slow down operations. The lack of intuitive design can even heighten the risk of errors, an issue that can be detrimental in highly regulated industries. With far greater legal, financial and safety implications than most other industries, even the smallest error could result in costly delays to market or damaging product recalls, which could lead to medical device manufacturers, for example, seeing a 10% drop in share price or food and beverage manufacturers seeing up to 55% of customers leave their brand, even if only temporarily.

With nearly 15% of pharmaceutical recalls between 2017-2019 a result of labelling issues, getting it right the first time and keeping it right in label and artwork management is vital but poor software usability can cause unnecessary roadblocks to get the product to market.

Poor UX impacts more than just operations

Not only are there financial ramifications for poor UX, but there are much deeper business issues too. A lack of software usability leads to lowered employee satisfaction where software applications make professionals’ jobs harder or wastes their valuable time on fixing problems. This impact can even go as far as raising levels of staff attrition.

Label and artwork professionals have to manage thousands of labels across multiple product ranges and languages. For example, one leading multinational consumer goods company alone has over 300,000 current pieces of artwork, which require up to 60,000 minor changes per year. Label and artwork professionals already have a time and labour-intensive job with a single artwork taking up to one hour to change manually. They need a software solution that will relieve cognitive overload to make mental space for higher level operations such as design optimisation and branding.

There are three essentials to high-quality UI and UX in label and artwork management software that allow professionals to flourish at their jobs without the burden of dealing with process changes and incurring possible errors.

1. Designed by manufacturing professionals for manufacturing professionals

Often those who design industrial software are doing so from a desk in an office, completely separate from the actual environment where the application will be used. This can immediately limit the usability of the software. The environments where industrial software is used, whether it is a plant floor, a print room, or a warehouse, can be challenging or even hazardous. So attention to the UI and cognitive load is paramount. A software UI that takes up a large amount of cognitive load is not practical to use in such high-intensity environments, therefore, in the case of label and artwork, a UI design that allows label and artwork professionals to seamlessly work within different industrial spaces is essential.

The UI for the Kallik label and artwork management (LAM) solution was developed through close collaboration with existing customers who are key industry players. It was then rigorously tested in real manufacturing scenarios to allow the creation of a label and artwork management solution that is perfectly adapted to the environments label and artwork professionals work in. This level of understanding of label and artwork management processes can only be achieved through the close collaboration and expertise of relevant industry players.

2. Intuitive use by design

An intuitive design helps industrial professionals do their job not just efficiently, but more accurately, reducing errors and decreasing unexpected costs and delays. Our software application, for example, leverages symbols and UI features common in personal applications to enhance the usability of the application. This creates the ultimate software application UX that reduces the need for extensive prior training as its systems for use reflect those of popular personal applications – allowing quick adoption of new software.

The software application interface also enables the mobility for plant operators to move between sites with ease while inspecting operations and allows designers and managers to access the software database on the move, from different work devices. Industry professionals need solutions that are designed with the end-user in mind and with the deep domain knowledge of manufacturing systems and operations to develop a UI that truly optimises critical manufacturing processes.

3. Streamlines complex functions into one manageable system

Industrial software solutions should make the lives of label and artwork professionals easier. That means they should be designed to simplify processes and streamline different functions into one, easy to navigate system. Quality UX design will collect all the tools and functionalities needed to complete tasks in one place for easy access and maximum efficiency. One UI, one view of all the processes involved.

The software design should also allow new integrations and capabilities to be added with ease over time to continuously improve UX and keep up with changes to the industrial environment. When we designed our label and artwork management software application, we made sure we would be able to seamlessly integrate more advanced user-facing features going forward, that can quickly become available to users. This could include the potential to build more mobile-enabled functionality into the software application in the future, such as graphical packages, 3D rendering technology or augmented reality views of labelling and artwork on the factory floor. Automatic updates allow for label and artwork professionals to receive consistently high standards of UX even as the industry changes.

The future of Label and Artwork Management software is UX optimised

UX optimised label and artwork management (LAM) software is the next step to optimising manufacturing processes. It is an investment worth making. For every dollar a company invests in improved UX, that dollar returns $100 in revenue. High-quality UX improves productivity for everyone involved in the labelling and artwork process, from designers and label creators to reviewers and auditors, and operations teams, all the way up to upper-level management.

Ensuring LAM software applications have a good UX benefits the entire value chain. The optimised operations boost speed to market and customer satisfaction, both crucial parts in an ever-changing industrial landscape that demands time critical, accurate, and value-added service and delivery.

Want to know more?

Whether you’re in the food and beverage, pharmaceutical, medical device, chemical, or even the cosmetic industry, our experts are ready to help you transform your labeling and artwork management with the help of our innovative software, leading the way in the labeling and artwork software space. Get in touch today to see what we can do for you at enquiries@kallik.com or call +44 (0) 1827 318100.