Elior North America Case Study - Asset Bank

“Asset Bank gave us structure; CI HUB gave us flow,” says Ben Pien, Senior Content Producer at Elior North America, a global food service company and Asset Bank client.

Ben’s story is familiar to many in his position – that of a marketer who’s got reams of excellent content at his fingertips, but doesn’t always know where it all is:

“Where did this image come from?” “Does anyone know if there’s a higher-res version of this?” “Which campaign was that video for?”

Ben explains how Asset Bank has restored order to what was becoming a chaotic content crisis.

Elior North America’s 13 companies serve 3.1 million people every day in 20,200 restaurants, across schools, universities, hospitals, senior living communities, senior congregate dining sites, correctional facilities, cultural attractions, corporate offices, and more, across the U.S.

Without daily nutritious meals, we cannot function at our best – not at school, at work, at home or in between.

The mission of all Elior North America companies is to provide healthy, delicious meals every day to every customer so they can feel their best, and in turn, help our business partners be their best.

With 13 sub-brands providing different food service offerings – spanning catering for education and healthcare, business dining, and even correctional facilities – each with their own identity, message and audience, it’s Ben’s job to make sure all the images, interviews, photos, graphic designs and videos are aligned with the right brand.

But Ben was facing a challenge.

As Elior’s teams grew and expanded, more and more content was created to help promote the 13 brand identities. More content, more engagement, more opportunity – great! But that content quickly became fragmented, buried in different places and frustratingly hard to find. Teams were using shared drives with no logical structure, some used personal folders on desktops, files were getting lost in email threads, and no one had a solid understanding of what content was current or whether or not it was approved for use.

The Challenge: Creative & Sales Time was Being Lost to Repetitive Administrative Tasks

The consequences were far greater than a few lost minutes here and there. Elior’s Proposal Team was wasting hours trying to find approved images to use in sales decks, when they could have been pitching and closing new deals. The Design Team was often grappling with numerous versions of the same photo, while others across the business were using outdated or unapproved visuals without even realising.

Perhaps most crucially, legal documentation, such as photography release forms for images that featured employees or dining guests, was becoming more difficult to manage, potentially putting Elior at serious financial and reputational risk.

It became harder and harder to keep visuals consistent across teams, brands and projects. A lot of creative time was getting swallowed up answering asset related queries rather than actually creating things. “We knew we had to do something,” Ben says.

Enter digital asset management platforms.

But what was crucial for Ben, wasn’t just an out-of-the-box SaaS tool. He knew he and his teams needed something, or someone, who could really help them rethink the way they were working.

“After a lot of research and a pretty long evaluation process, we landed on Asset Bank.
They weren’t just selling a product, they were really listening to us and listening to our needs.”

Ben says the Asset Bank team weren’t phased when he explained the differing and complex needs for Elior’s specific use cases:

“We threw some pretty big asks their way and they didn’t shy away at all. They just rolled up their sleeves, worked with us on the custom set-ups and helped us design a system that matched how we work.”

“We finally had a central hub for photos, videos, design files, releases… And a place for our employees to go to access approved assets for their sales and marketing enablement needs.

“For our Proposal team, it meant they could grab what they needed on their own, without waiting days for someone to confirm if it was the right file.

“For our designers, it meant fewer Teams messages and fewer versions flying around. They could work with confidence knowing they were using the right materials.

“And for me and the team, it also meant less time chasing down files, and more time spent focusing on strategy and creation.”

Ben explains that the user-based permissions and acces rights meant people across the business could be given limited access to downloadable content via Asset Banks’s user-friendly platform. No major training needed, and no concerns over content being used in the wrong campaign.

“Everything became more accessible, without sacrificing quality control.”

But there were more efficiency hacks to be had – this time, specifically within Elior’s design and proposals teams.

Designers were leaving their design apps, going into Asset Bank, downloading files, saving them locally, and then pulling them into their work for editing or updating – then re-uploading back into Asset Bank.

“It sounds small, but when you’re doing it a dozen times a day, it’s a huge time suck.”

Plus, this meant version control was going out the window. “We started to see duplicated assets building up: different people saving the same asset with different names, or tweaking things and forgetting to update the source.

“All of a sudden we were at risk of drifting away from the consistency that we had worked so hard to build with Asset Bank.”

CI HUB’s Connector was the perfect solution. Acting as a bridge between Asset Bank and design tools - like the entire Adobe Creative Cloud, Figma, Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace – CI HUB enables direct access to the content within Asset Bank, without ever leaving your creative platform.

From Interrupted Workflows to Creative Flow

Instead of jumping between platforms, designers can now browse Asset Bank from within Adobe, they can drag and drop assets directly into their layouts, linking to a source of truth, and always pull the most recent, current, approved file.

“It was a total game changer for us. The creative flow wasn’t being interrupted any more. We weren't manually managing files, and the assets stayed linked, reducing version confusion even further.”

“In short, CI HUB gave our teams momentum.”

Combining these two tools rocketed productivity. “Turnaround times have dropped, we’re faster on proposals, faster on design revisions, our visual consistency is stronger across all of our brands, and collaboration is much smoother, especially between proposals, design, marketing and myself.”

“We’ve gotten back our creative space. We’re spending way less time digging through folders and way more time creating things that actually move the needle for us. We’re telling better stories, with more focus and way less stress.”

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