Is your DAM delivering what it promised?
Many organizations can’t answer that question with any confidence. Assets can’t be found, so they’re recreated Metadata drifts. Users download files from email threads because they’ve stopped trusting the system. And when leadership questions the investment, no one has a clear baseline to work from.
A DAM health check gives you evidence of how your DAM is being used and how it’s performing.
What we evaluate
Ntara runs focused discovery workshops with the people who use the system day to day: creative, marketing, ecommerce, legal, and IT. We examine configuration, taxonomy, metadata schema, governance workflows, rights and licensing records, and user adoption data. Then, we score your DAM across six dimensions that determine whether the system is working or stalling.
Asset governance: Are approval workflows enforced? Are permissions configured correctly by role and followed?
Metadata and taxonomy: Is metadata consistent and complete enough to make assets findable and usable across teams?
Rights and licensing: Are usage rights tracked at the asset level? Are expirations flagged before they create compliance exposure?
User adoption: Which teams are using the DAM as intended? Who is working around it, and why?
Integration health: How does your DAM connect to PIM, CMS, ecommerce, and creative tools? Where are the gaps?
ROI and fit: Is the system delivering against the outcomes that justified the original investment?
What you get
At the end of a DAM health check, you get:
- Scored assessment across all six dimensions
- Prioritized roadmap with actionable next steps, sequenced by impact and effort
- Documented gap analysis between current state and what your DAM should be doing for the business
- Objective data to inform your fix-versus-replatform decision
The health check gives you and your leadership team a shared baseline. That way, the decision between optimizing what you have and making a platform change is grounded in data.
Results we’ve seen
For Bouclair, we pinpointed critical gaps in governance and integration. With an expensive license renewal looming, a DAM health check provided the evidence they needed to act quickly. We migrated 85,000+ assets and delivered a live, integrated DAM in two weeks, at 50% lower cost than their previous platform.
Kimberly-Clark faced a similar inflection point. Confidence in the DAM had eroded due to it being outdated, with unclear permissions and no rights-management controls. With data from a structured health check, they decided to upgrade systems, gaining functionality and saving money. Since then, they’ve migrated 250,000+ assets. They have a dynamic metadata model for 700+ users and have closed major digital rights management gaps.
What we find in the field
Across DAM engagements, the same failure patterns surface regardless of platform or industry. Here is what we typically uncover, and what a health check does about each one.
Asset governance gaps that cause product leaks.
A global shoemaker had 5,000+ DAM users with no clear permissions across two huge brands. But they had a bigger problem. Assets intended for upcoming campaigns were leaking before launch. An audit helped map every permission gap, inform a platform change, and set up the controls to stop it.
Metadata drift that makes assets unfindable.
When taxonomy breaks down, users stop searching and start recreating. For Kimberly-Clark, inconsistent metadata across product photography, video, and packaging files meant 700+ users couldn’t trust search results. The health check surfaced gaps in their metadata model. The implementation that followed built a dynamic metadata schema that adjusts fields by asset type, so uploads are intuitive and search is reliable.
Rights and licensing blind spots.
One of the most common compliance risks we find is that no one knows which assets are cleared to use. Kimberly-Clark had no way to track usage rights per image against contract timelines. The health check documented the gap; the fix added expiration tracking and automated alerts. Legal no longer relies on spreadsheets to manage it.
Low adoption despite a live system.
Adoption is the ROI lever most organizations underinvest in. Visual Comfort had a modern DAM that they barely used. During a PIM engagement, Ntara surfaced the untapped potential. We built a bidirectional integration between their PIM and DAM, giving teams a reason to use the system and a better way to search it.
Disconnected PIM and DAM slow product launches.
When PIM and DAM are siloed, moving assets and enriching data takes hours of manual effort. Columbus McKinnon managed 77,000+ SKUs across 19 global brands with PIM and DAM running independently. We built a bidirectional connector between the systems so that updates in one system flow to the other without manual intervention.
A platform that no longer fits.
Bouclair’s existing DAM didn’t meet its needs, and a costly renewal was weeks away. A health check assessment confirmed that replatforming was the right call. With Bynder and Ntara, they migrated 85,000+ assets and went live in two weeks—without interrupting syndication to their ecommerce site—at 50% lower cost.
When a health check makes sense
- Your DAM has been live for a year or more, but adoption is low or uneven across teams
- Users are downloading assets from email threads or shared drives instead of the DAM
- You’re facing a replatform conversation and want data before you commit
- Rights and licensing records are incomplete or out of sync
- Leadership is questioning the return on the DAM investment
Ready to get a clear read on your DAM?
A DAM health check is a scoped, predictable engagement. If you’re weighing a DAM decision, start here.
