Wolverhampton-based full service ad agency Connect Advertising & Marketing has used Flowmation for the last couple of years, having been a customer of Silicon Systems since installing a digital asset management system in 2004. The company's clients include Tarmac, LDV and Bentley.

The initial impetus for buying Silicon System's DAM solution was a simple need to gain control of the imagery coming into the agency on disks, with hours sometimes being spent trawling through CDs looking for the right image, according to David Manns, who looks after the IT side of the agency, as well as design and artwork.

"It became clear that actually hosting their image library was something that we could offer to our clients, and it has worked out well, with LDV and Tarmac in particular. It was an investment but we are seeing a return on that investment now," says Manns.

Switching to Flowmation two years ago meant the agency had a much more user friendly and intuitive system, which was also easily customisable, so that Tarmac, for instance, has its image library site branded in its own corporate identity. LDV's European dealer network uses Flowmation to create jobs such as press ads and direct mail packs, with users annotating PDFs through the system and these passing through to the relevant account handlers.

Manns says the software allows a company to define the workflow through which a job might pass. The agency introduces the system to clients, in small steps, starting with image library functionality and then progressing to project management and approvals.

"Another reason we chose Flowmation was to centralise the way we work," Manns continues. "All the creative and artwork files that we work on day to day are centralised and it has had a huge impact for the agency. Like with images, there's no more trawling through disks or on people's desktops. We're not wasting all that time now."