Challenge

Communication is Difficult

In many organizations, communication challenges are often discussed but rarely are actions taken to fix those challenges. At Creative Force, communication is one of the most important pieces of our workflow puzzle. The easier it is to share information throughout your organization, the faster and more efficiently your projects will be completed.

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Common Obstacles

What's the problem (and our solution)?

Outdated and static style guides

Every team communicates style guides differently. Some email documents, others print them out, and some tack them right up on the wall. No matter how your team does it, if style guides are located in more than one place, have updates, or worse, can’t be found, the team may not be following the right instructions.

Our Solution: Single source of truth

Dynamic style guides in Creative Force are more than just references for your team. They ensure consistency and direction by intelligently managing all image requirements, automatically and in one place.

Wherever the style guide is relevant, it will appear automatically throughout the workflow, without the need for development or complicated setups. The days of trying to find the most recent style guide are over.

Tracking is manual and inaccurate

Making sure that projects are on-time and complete is important to every studio. If your team doesn’t know where assets are in the journey, it’s very difficult to get a high-level overview of production progress.

Our Solution: Real-time production tracking

From sample check-in to final delivery, advanced overviews in Creative Force easily communicate to everyone exactly what’s happening, where it’s happening, and what needs to happen next.

Being able to see all of this allows teams to identify bottlenecks, optimize processes, and stay on track (and on budget). As steps are completed, production tracking is updated in real-time and in the cloud.

Unclear or complex approval processes

PDFs, marked-up prints, endless email chains, and instructions hidden in spreadsheets: sharing assets for review and approval can create significant bottlenecks in your workflow. It’s especially difficult ensuring that the communication is clear and direct without getting lost in emails, messages, texts, or misplaced completely.

Our Solution: Cloud review and collaboration

With Creative Force, you can create flexible approval processes using intuitive Kanban views and give detailed instructions for post-production—in context, in the cloud. With role-based access control, you can even invite external clients to approve selects during the creative process (Editorial Projects only).

Manual file management results in mistakes

With so many files moving throughout the ecosystem, file management can be a significant challenge. When manual data entry, renaming, and more are added to the list, there’s a big possibility of miscommunication, mistakes, and missing files.

Our Solution: Automated file management

Creative Force eliminates manual file handling. From file naming and metadata enrichment to distribution, users aren’t required to touch the source files.

The platform handles everything from moving to the next step of the workflow to delivering to the final destination, making the entire process smoother, faster, and with fewer mistakes.

External programs don’t connect seamlessly

Most content creation studios use multiple programs to create incredible imagery and video. If those programs don’t communicate well with each other, the disconnect may waste time, cause delays, or worse.

Our Solution: Direct API integrations

Creative Force has direct API integrations with the leading software your teams use every day. From capture software like Capture One to editing software like Adobe Photoshop, Creative Force creates a single source of truth that ties all of your systems together.

We become the production backbone that all systems refer back to. And, if we don’t have an integration that your team needs, we’d love to talk about how we can create one for your team.

Communicating content edits effectively

Sometimes communicating content edits are extremely clear and easy to complete, other times, they’re subtle and if not communicated clearly, could slip through the cracks causing delays or multiple drafts.

Our Solution: Retouching notes

Retouching notes ensure clear communication throughout markups and instructions for editing. Users can comment directly on images in the system which is then presented to the retoucher/editor in the tool they retouch them in, Photoshop.

Users also have versions of the image through every step of production, so it's easy to reset back to a previous version if something needs to change. This is in contrast to the past when people might have edited the original files.

A closer look

Streamlining Communication in Studio Operations

Creative Force is designed to centralize your whole production process in one place, so you don't have to juggle between emails and project management tools. It ensures that you're always working with images and sample records in a way that lets you see the product's path from start to finish.

This feature is really helpful for tasks that need personal input, like choosing images and making sure assets are high quality. Taking images out of the workflow to choose or give feedback can create extra work and chances for confusion. With Creative Force, these steps occur within the platform, so there's no need to make extra copies of images or tasks.

When you choose, review, and approve edits in Creative Force, you're viewing the most current version of the image, but a copy of that image is preserved at each step of the way. There are no low-quality proofs, and no cloud-based folders full of unused images to sort through. When you look at and interact with an image, it's always linked to the process.

Creative Force allows you to customize your workflow and style guides. This means you can set up the process of choosing images, quality checking, and approving in a way that suits your team, the retouching process, and your clients' needs.

workflow automation

For example, during the photography step, you can let your photographers make the final selects and automatically send those images to post-production. Or, you can also set up the workflows so the team on-site simply hands over a group of images to an art director or a client to choose from that group.

Creative Force also lets you reject images completely and provide notes and image markups explaining why. The photo team gets an automatic notification from Creative Force if more shots are needed for a product.

Throughout post-production, you can also adjust your workflow to require quality check steps at various points. These steps work a lot like the process of choosing images. The team that touches up the images gets an automatic notification if an image has been rejected and can check and address those notes directly in Creative Force’s Photoshop integration app.

Although software can't entirely remove the need for user input, Creative Force can build a structure that ensures consistency and makes sure images are high quality. This saves your team time and effort, so they can focus less on how to communicate and more on creating great content.

Feature Focus

Selects, QC, and Approvals

No matter what tools you use to manage your studio's work, nothing beats having the right people look at your images. They can tell which ones fit your brand and are ready to use, and which ones need a bit more work. Clear communication is necessary for this step to avoid a lot of confusion.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is Creative Force, and how does it work?

Creative Force is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that helps brands and retailers accelerate their eCommerce creative content production. It simplifies the process of planning and producing eCommerce content, improves cross-team collaboration, and ensures more transparency across every stage of production. With Creative Force, companies always deliver the highest-quality content on time and on budget.

Built on “flow production” principles, our platform utilizes intelligent automation to streamline workflows, resulting in consistent and repeatable processes. Creative Force also integrates seamlessly with existing systems, like Capture One and Adobe Creative Cloud, and features an intuitive interface.

How does flow production work?

In traditional batch production, all assets go through a single production stage before moving to the next step. This approach can lead to bottlenecks and delays.

Creative Force simplifies content production through a continuous process called "flow production." This process involves moving individual assets through various production stages as soon as they are ready, resulting in an efficient and scalable content production workflow.

Who can use Creative Force?

Creative Force is for brands, retailers, and commercial studios with in-house or external teams that produce and manage eCommerce content, such as photography, video, and copywriting.

Creative Force provides intelligent workflow automation, enhanced production visibility, and a range of collaboration tools that benefit all teams, including studio intake, styling, capture, post-production, marketing, and more. By choosing Creative Force, you can scale your content production, gain better operational visibility, and speed up time-to-market.

Does Creative Force integrate with my existing systems?

Yes, Creative Force is designed to seamlessly integrate with your existing tech stack. We have industry-leading integrations with Capture One, Adobe Creative Cloud, and more.

The platform’s API-first architecture enables our customers to seamlessly connect with Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems, Product Information Management (PIM) systems, cloud storage platforms, and any other required destinations.

Creative Force also makes it simple to work with external post-production vendors via FTP or API integrations.

Finally, our VPI Management extension makes it simple to work with product vendors to request, receive, and manage vendor-provided images (VPI).

What kind of support can I expect?

We understand that implementing a new system can be challenging, but our team is here to make the process as seamless and stress-free as possible. Our onboarding team will work closely with your team to set up Creative Force and empower your future success.

After onboarding, your Customer Success Manager will check in regularly. Our customer support team is also available 24/7 to help you with any product questions or concerns. In addition, we offer self-paced learning resources such as academy courses, support center documentation, and other materials to help you along your Creative Force journey.

On top of best-in-class customer support, we continuously update our platform with new features and improvements. Our biweekly releases can be easily installed without interrupting your work.