Canto helps Lalique improve the management of its assets globally

One of the unique challenges of being a global brand with subsidiaries operating in different countries is building a cohesive and consistent IT environment that streamlines operations and processes. Lalique utilizes several ERPs and information systems across its offices in North America, Europe, and Asia, but the digital team in Switzerland saw an opportunity to handle product and brand assets more efficiently by implementing a digital asset management (DAM) platform.

After a successful trial period in which the digital team used DAM software to consolidate, organize, and share assets associated with the perfume department, Lalique decided to begin the process of expanding the use case to other areas of the business. But while the concept had certainly proved to be a success, the team wasn’t sure it had the right DAM solution in place for the task.

“It was a good first experience,” says Pascal Lemeunier, Functional Project Manager at Lalique, “but I realized the product was not adapted to our size of company. It was from the first or second generation of DAM and was not really user friendly or intuitive.”

After much consideration, Pascal decided to push for an alternative DAM solution that would be easier to implement across multiple departments and provide more flexibility for the people using it.

The team evaluated several potential DAM platforms to find a replacement, but the ideal solution ended up being closer to home than expected. Lalique’s North America subsidiary was already using Canto to manage their digital assets. From a back-end perspective, Canto offered a simple implementation process that made it easy to migrate data from the previous DAM and integrate Lalique’s existing applications. It also provided an intuitive user experience that would allow people to start using it right away without an extensive onboarding process.

“When you log into the Canto solution, it’s really a step forward,” Pascal says. “There aren’t too many steps, and you understand the concept of folders and albums on one side and filters of attributes on the other. Canto is easy to use, and to train our employees and teams to use.”

Organizing Lalique’s assets

After making the decision to switch to Canto, the initial implementation got underway quickly with the digital team in Switzerland. They began by migrating data from the previous DAM and recreating the same functional scope and organization of assets. Once Lalique’s digital assets had been consolidated into a single source of truth within Canto, the digital team could get started on organizing everything, so that files would be easy to locate when they’re needed. To improve searchability, they implemented a process for adding metadata to assets as they were uploaded into the library.

“Our data quality is very important,” Pascal explains. “If we bring this concept to everyone that if they have good data, if they can filter by tags and keywords and copyrights, and dates, that’s going to be easier for them and their partners to get the content they want.”

Phased rollout across departments

Once the data itself was transferred and organized, the digital team used Canto’s Portals feature to empower Lalique Beauty Service departments to curate the assets they needed to work with and distribute. The process went so smoothly that the team decided to start rolling Canto out to other departments. Within two months of implementation, the communication team was set up with its own portals. The marketing and sales departments followed soon afterwards.

Pascal was pleased with the speedy progress: “It was really impressive. In four months we were able to migrate to Canto and the team took to the new tool very quickly. The marketing department built their first portal in hours and without our help.”

Initially, portal access was confined to internal processes while the team worked out the best way to organize and share assets. After everyone felt comfortable with accessing portals and contributing to the Canto library, the platform could be turned outward to share content with customers and media outlets.

Streamlining department workflows

Phase three of Lalique’s implementation involved setting up good workflow processes to help streamline operations. While the team has only begun to explore how it wants to set up these processes, Pascal envisions a system where it’s easy to determine the status of a project so collaborators can find out what is pending and what is approved by a department.

“The goal is to bring all our departments on the platform,” he says. “Once they use Canto on a daily basis with portals and workspaces and download links, we can get rid of all the storage drives and external tools we don’t need anymore.”

Bringing Lalique’s global subsidiaries in North America, Europe, and Asia into a shared ecosystem for managing brand and product assets would provide the company with much greater flexibility and allow various departments to work together more efficiently.

After transitioning to Canto, the Lalique team has made tremendous progress in its ongoing effort to standardize software and processes across the company. In the span of only a few months, they migrated and organized their asset library and scaled the platform to multiple departments. Internal users are already building portals and using links to locate assets and share content with various contributors easier than ever before.

“The teams are really happy to finally see a DAM in place,” Pascal says. “We had to make a change and Canto was a really good opportunity to make this happen.”

Lalique’s experience shows that implementing new technology doesn’t have to be a headache for IT project managers. Canto makes it easy to integrate powerful DAM capabilities within a short time frame without compromising security or performance.