DRIVING BRAND PERFORMANCE WITH

KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS (KPIs)

FOR BRANDED GRAPHICS
DRIVING BRAND PERFORMANCE WITH KEY PERFORMANCE
INDICATORS (KPIs) FOR BRANDED GRAPHICS
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
In the production phase of branded materials,
errors and inefficiencies always have root
causes. Key performance indicators (KPIs)
help you locate and identify those causes and
give you the facts you need to correct them.
KPIs foster collaborative analysis among the
brand owner and all production supply-chain
partners to promote efficient and effective
processes – and to improve and innovate on
them continuously.
Of course that’s what KPIs should do for
almost any process in almost any kind of
industry. Where the production of brand
materials is concerned, the key questions are,
“What are the right KPIs and how can we
implement and act on them?” Surprisingly,
many brand owners aren’t clear on these
answers. They’re missing a huge opportunity.
This paper will help provide those answers.
WHAT DO KPIs ACHIEVE
FOR THE PRODUCTION PROCESS?
In short, KPI data leads to insights that
encourage concrete steps to process
improvements that increase a brand’s
efficiency, agility and faithfulness to standards.
Simultaneously, these improvements decrease
errors, time to market and costs. Specifically,
these process improvements can include:
• Better project briefs. Inefficient brands
have poorly conceived and vaguely
written project briefs. Missing or incorrect
information results in delays, additional
work cycles and extra cost. Effective KPIs
promote visibility into the quality of
project-related information and project
success overall.
• Clear communication hierarchy. This
leads to improvement in fewer jobs
fast-tracked, fewer revision cycles and
faster approval time.
• Greater visibility into projects. This drives
process efficiency and flexibility through
effective resource allocation.
In contrast, companies with weak or no KPIs
suffer from:
• Lack of benchmarks to measure against.
• Limited data to quantify performance.
• Little or no supply chain visibility.
• Weaknesses in efficiency, agility and brand
fidelity, and the resulting diminished
bottom-line performance.
DRIVING BRAND PERFORMANCE WITH KEY PERFORMANCE
INDICATORS (KPIs) FOR BRANDED GRAPHICS

SEEING THE VALUE OF KPIs

Within brands, sometimes the departments
of marketing and procurement have distinct
value priorities. This doesn’t need to be the
case with KPIs. When decision-makers align
to common values across domains, they see
the mutual benefits.
Brand owners should be interested in how
project briefs are developed and how clear,
concise and effective they are. Procurement
typically wants to drive costs out of the
process. Both teams benefit from tracking the
activities we will suggest below.
At most companies, procurement puts out
RFPs and pricing matrices; but these are only
the first stage of brand process management,
relating to the basic costs of materials and
services. These don’t shed light on a brand’s
effectiveness in:
• The on-time delivery of materials at each
stage in the production supply chain.
• The accuracy of materials as they’re
produced and copy as it’s deployed on
those materials – a key issue where
regulations are concerned.
TWO PRODUCTION KPI TRENDS
Schawk is seeing traditional barriers
coming down regarding the sharing of
KPI data within organizations.
• The sharing of results and analysis
across product categories.
• The sharing across geographical
regions.
These trends are enabled by technologies
such as graphics lifecycle management
tools and cloud-based print quality
management tools. These encourage
the collection of extensive data, quick
reporting, insightful analysis and easy
sharing.
But just as crucial is the willingness
within brands to share insights and
acknowledge process weaknesses that can
be addressed, especially with the help of
powerful data and production partners
who are also committed to optimum
graphics production workflows. Here
is more on this subject, from Schawk
expert Michael Leeds.

• The preservation of the brand values and

equity that are represented in all materials.
These benefits are not what the brand is
paying for directly from their production
partners, and there is no line item for these in
any RFP or pricing matrix. But KPIs make
it clear how the brand and its production
partners need to function to achieve
these benefits – and then KPIs measure
performance toward them. Marketers and
procurement people simply need to agree on
this and then establish KPIs that drive brand
performance.
DRIVING BRAND PERFORMANCE WITH KEY PERFORMANCE
INDICATORS (KPIs) FOR BRANDED GRAPHICS
INCORPORATING KPIs
The basic steps in incorporating KPIs are
quite logical. But the devil is in the details.
There are independent consultants who advise
brands on this process; larger production
firms also can offer this service as part of
their overall delivery. This second option
has the logical advantage of streamlining
communication. Regardless of who oversees
the process, the key steps are:
• Identify what to measure and what the
measurements should tell you. Here you
are building a hierarchy of production
activities to measure and an understanding
of how they relate to your ultimate goals of
efficiency, agility and accuracy of materials
through optimized briefing, review and
approval processes.
• Determine the best ways to gather and
measure the information. Although some
KPIs are basic, some can be arduous
to track if the brand lacks the tools,
technology or resources – for example,
if the brand does not use an electronic
communication routing tool, or if its
tool is inferior to one available from a
production partner. Ultimately there must
be a consistent process to capture data on
the activities measured as part of the KPI.
• Determine baseline performance goals.
What levels of performance for the
production activities will translate to the
overall goals you’ve set?
• Articulate and interpret the findings
and translate them to actionable
measures. This step is fairly straightforward
when the previous steps have been
handled effectively.
WHICH KPIs SHOULD YOU TRACK?
Many brands focus on the “base level” KPIs
listed immediately below. The first two may
be important in tracking what has been done,
but they provide limited forward-looking
value; the rest provide insight into process,
technical or organizational issues and are more
valuable for driving improvements.
• Spend in production art, premedia, adaptive
creative (historical).
• Spend by substrate, flexible packaging,
carton packaging, aluminum (historical).
• Project duration time (process/technical/
organizational).
• Rework cycles (process/technical/
organizational).
• Incoming errors (process/technical/
organizational).
• On-time performance (process/technical/
organizational).
For a more effective program, Schawk has
formulated a set of eight essential KPIs. You
can see that these promote an analysis of core
workflow processes and point to solutions for
problems that are uncovered.
• Number/percentage of jobs fast tracked/
rushed at some point in the schedule.
This helps uncover risks to quality and
consistency and helps determine if pricing
is fair to both client and production
partner. This also allows the production
partner to forecast demand for services
more accurately and can indicate when
smart-sourcing for additional capacity
should be considered.
• Number of revision cycles and their
drivers. This typically involves a
comparison of revision cycle numbers
across brand teams or portfolios. When
there’s a difference in the sample groups,
DRIVING BRAND PERFORMANCE WITH KEY PERFORMANCE
INDICATORS (KPIs) FOR BRANDED GRAPHICS

their respective processes are analyzed
for evidence of problems, such as the
quality of incoming information, too little
involvement of higher-ranking decision
makers early in the process, etc.
• Client approval time. Disparities between
products or categories can signal flaws in
the client’s approval process and point to
the need for better visibility or workflow
technology.
• Production cycle time. This can give the
first indication of inefficient processes.
• Average cost per job relative to total spend.
Projects with similar scopes and deliverables
can be compared for insights.
• Number/percentage of jobs done right the
first time. This is a crucial baseline KPI
that relates to the quality of processes and
communication.
• Number/percentage of incoming errors
on design files. This can help to start
pinpointing the source of workflow issues
upstream.
• Overall on-time performance (and a subset
of this, cycles relative to service agreement).
This KPI can be slightly more difficult to
outline. Measuring “on-time performance”
requires a hard start date and delivery date;
when these are fluid, it’s difficult to achieve
consensus.
SEEING KPIs THROUGH TO THEIR BENEFITS
Brand owners must take a few steps to ensure
that KPI data is translated into concrete actions
and continued improvements. Several steps are
key:
• Make sure there’s a steering committee or
leadership team that performs a regular
(for instance, quarterly) business review.
Without a formal venue and scheduled
meetings, KPI data may be reported but not
acted on.
• The steering committee must see to it that
information and recommendations are
delivered to marketing, marketing services
or procurement, and that concrete plans are
made.
• The brand owner must be committed to
long-term, sustainable relationships and to
letting production partners collaborate with
marketing and other key players within
the brand. This allows procurement to
do its job of sharing information without
assigning blame.
• The process of the steering committee
driving the results down through workflow-
chain partners in creative and production is
vital, especially early in the relationship.

A KPI SPECIFIC TO SCHAWK

The health of a production relationship depends on many factors beyond those measured
by traditional KPIs – such as whether the production partner is knowledgeable, engaged
and responsive. So for many clients, Schawk performs surveys of our delivery of key services.
We survey everyone we work with on an account – as many as 80 people, including our
contacts at other partners, such as printers. The results are statistically significant. We share
these findings with the overall brand team at regular business meetings. This is something
brands should expect from a production partner.
DRIVING BRAND PERFORMANCE WITH KEY PERFORMANCE
INDICATORS (KPIs) FOR BRANDED GRAPHICS

Schawk is a global brand deployment company that

produces brand assets and protects brand equities.
Schawk identifies and deploys scalable solutions to
address a brand’s complex production and delivery needs
through proven expertise in workflow, resourcing, color
management and imaging. We bring our clients’ brands
to market faster, with greater accuracy, consistency and
efficiency across mediums, protecting the equities that
make them more desirable and profitable. Schawk is part of
SGK. For more information visit: http://www.schawk.com

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