Odin saves time and money

Cost savings in the product design-to-shelf process and a significant reduction in product development time are two of the benefits of a new online brand management system being launch called Odin.

After four years in development with clients such as Asda, this unique and comprehensive system is now being brought to market in a bid to streamline and speed up the brand development process for grocery retailers, private label manufacturers and brand owners across the world.

The brainchild of designers Martin Hawkins and Paul Bean, Odin was first conceived as a management tool for its clients to help bring together all elements of the product development, design and approval process into one easy to use system.

Working with clients such as Asda, Twinings, Danone, and Somerfield.

Odin has been refined and developed during this time to truly meet the specific challenges of these world-class companies and has been proven to offer significant competitive advantage by dramatically reducing speed-to-market by up to 30%.

Odin is the first online brand management system of its kind on the market.

"Designed by marketers for marketers, Odin truly understands the challenges that brand managers, product developers, designers and packaging managers face," said Executive Director, Martin Hawkins.

"It has been designed to ensure that the development process is controlled and managed effectively so costs are minimised and the highest quality achieved, of course all within the shortest timeframe." With three functional modules, Odin provides a flexible system that can work separately or be combined depending on the client's requirements.

Odin On Time manages the New Product Development production cycle and gives brand owners total control by planning the entire workflow and execution process.

This interactive module communicates specific tasks to individuals within the team and provides continual up-to-date information on the status of the project to the brand manager, tracking completed actions and highlighting overdue ones.

Once complete, it also manages the final stages providing printing specifications, management of external printers as well as legal reporting of waste volumes.

This is complemented by Odin Sprint, which manages the design and graphics process and offers a pre-determined best practice workflow that provides visibility for all nominated internal and external parties throughout the entire process.

This includes generating briefs for suppliers, enabling online amendments with real-time updates so multiple users can approve simultaneously, through to providing checklists to show the current stage of the process to all parties and a proactive e-mail alert system to remind of overdue tasks.

Finally, Odin Assets completes the set with a storage and retrieval system that holds all photography, logos, design briefs, advertisements, brand guidelines and graphics in a secure central library.

This enables both the internal and external teams to quickly produce and deliver a consistent product image, and encourages image recycling to gain maximum value from these precious resources.

By adopting Odin, brand owners can improve their competitiveness within the crowded grocery retail market and also significantly reduce costs in the NPD process according to Martin Hawkins.

"Our work with a leading retailer, Asda has led to significant savings across their new product development and design to print process and reduced the whole product development to print process from over 32 weeks to just 20 on average.

And this comes at a time when they have increased the number of product lines changed or developed from 3000 to over 6000 per annum.

"It has taken four years to develop Odin into a robust, world-class brand management tool that can work right across the brand development process.

However, with the brand owners and private label manufacturers under increasing pressure to deliver more products in a shorter time frame, we believe that Odin will be an invaluable solution in helping them to meet these challenges head on, efficiently and in a cost effective way.".

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