Esko’s WebCenter Go streamlines packaging workflows

In an increasingly competitive consumer goods landscape, the transition from a handful of product launches to hundreds can often lead to a breaking point in packaging management. To address this scaling crisis, Esko hosted an intensive webinar on 13 January, featuring WebCenter Go — an AI-led artwork management solution designed specifically for mid-market and fast-growing consumer packaged goods and brands.

The session was led by Rajiv Mehra, account lead for global markets at Esko, and Rakesh Edavalath, director of product at Esko. Together, they highlighted a critical gap in the industry: while start-ups manage via email and large enterprises utilise complex, year-long implementations, emerging brands are frequently left struggling with generic project management tools that lack the technical rigour required for packaging.

The growing pains of manual approval
According to Edavalath, the chaos typically begins when a brand scales beyond 50 artwork launches per year. “When you are a small brand, a tight-knit process works,” he explained. “Where things start to break down is when you grow to 300 or 1,000 launches a year. You have designers working on one version while reviewers approve another. This is a good problem to have because it means you are growing, but it requires a dedicated system to ensure accuracy.”

Rajiv Mehra underscored the financial impact of these manual hurdles, noting that missed deadlines and labelling errors directly hinder go-to-market (GTM) speeds.

Enterprise power without the complexity
WebCenter Go is positioned as a middle-ground solution. It strips away the heavy IT infrastructure requirements and year-long onboarding cycles of enterprise-grade systems, offering instead a plug-and-play experience.

Edavalath showcased the four fundamental pillars of the WebCenter Go platform, beginning with an intuitive project management canvas. This module allows teams to visually design their workflows as flowcharts, which effectively automates the complex hand-offs between marketing, design, and regulatory departments. By mapping these processes digitally, the platform ensures that every stakeholder is automatically notified of their specific tasks, removing the need for manual coordination.

The second pillar includes a comprehensive proofing suite, providing a technical viewer that exceeds the capabilities of standard PDF readers. This suite enables users to perform pixel-to-pixel comparisons between different artwork versions to spot minute changes, while also offering automated font and colour management checks. Furthermore, it allows for precise digital annotations, ensuring that all feedback is captured directly on the artwork rather than being lost in disparate email chains.

Complementing these tools is a digital asset management (DAM) system that functions as a centralised library for the organisation. This library automatically tags and archives approved files as soon as a project is finalised, ensuring that the latest verified version of an artwork is always accessible. This automated archiving eliminates the common industry risk of using outdated or unapproved files for production.

Finally, the platform introduces AI-powered compliance through a tool known as "Comply." Functioning as a digital assistant for reviewers, this AI scans artworks for critical errors — such as incorrect barcodes, missing ingredients, or font-size non-compliance — before a human reviewer even opens the file. By highlighting these discrepancies early, the system significantly reduces the risk of product recalls and allows quality control teams to focus their expertise on high-level decision-making.

AI assistant as a regulatory game-changer
The most discussed feature was the integration of AI-led quality inspection. Rather than replacing human judgement, the "Comply" tool acts as an assistant that handles mundane, repeatable checks.

“AI can scan the entire artwork and identify that a '7-day' consumption warning on the label contradicts the '14-day' instruction in the marketing brief,” Edavalath noted as an instance. By automating the verification of barcodes, nutrition tables, and spell-checks in multiple languages — including right-to-left scripts — the software allows regulatory teams to focus on core strategic tasks rather than manual proofreading.

Measurable results for lean teams
The webinar concluded with testimonials from the D2C and pharmaceutical spaces, revealing that brands using the system have seen approval cycles drop from four weeks to just two. For lean teams, this 40% to 70% improvement in time-to-market translates directly into increased revenue and lower operational risk.

“If you are early to market, you sell more,” Mehra concluded. “By removing the redundant, mundane tasks of chasing emails and version numbers, we are helping brands focus on their core job: innovation.”