5FLOW

Your artwork manager didn't train for years in packaging and compliance to spend their afternoon hunting for a file someone saved in the wrong folder. And yet… We’ve all been there. Our CTO, Sriram Upadhyayula, blames this on disconnected systems on Episode 1 of 5FLOW’s new podcast Under Review: "There are a lot of things our artwork operators, PMs, compliance managers, QC analysts do beyond their actual work. Some of the dirty work, for lack of a better word. Organizing a brief in a structured manner, cleaning up files, finding files. This friction, this work they shouldn't be doing, they're doing today because of the systems we've built over the years that don't talk to each other." That means hours and hours going to admin work, instead of work that requires actual expertise. All because your systems aren’t connected. Full episode is live on https://lnkd.in/eiGePWfn, also on Spotify and YouTube.

A regulation changes. Hundreds of SKUs need updating. Every single one needs QC before it can move. In other words, a packaging nightmare. Volume doesn't break processes evenly. It finds the weakest point and piles up there. For some teams that's approvals. For others it's version control, or getting sign-off across multiple markets before anything can ship. Knowing where your process actually breaks is the first step to fixing it. Automation applied to the wrong bottleneck just moves the pile-up somewhere else. Where does it break for you? And do you know how to fix it?

Your fastest team might be making your workflow more inefficient. You read that right. Surprising, and yet, It's one of the sharper points CTO of Propelis and 5FLOW President, Sriram Upadhyayula, made in Episode 1 of "Under Review". His example: one team adopts AI and starts producing content five times faster. Sounds like a win. Except the next team in the chain is still reviewing everything manually. So the work just piles up one step further down the line. In his words: "You've moved the bottleneck from step one to step two, but you have not solved anything." It's a small shift in thinking with big implications for how packaging and brand teams should actually be approaching AI. Not team by team, but end to end. We get into where the real bottlenecks hide, what "AI-native workflow" actually means in practice, and why waiting for the perfect moment to start might be the most expensive decision a team can make. Full episode is live on https://lnkd.in/eiGePWfn, also on Spotify and YouTube.

Something new is coming from 5FLOW. We're calling it "Under Review": conversations with the people shaping how packaging and brand teams actually work. Real talk about what's changing (or what should be changing and isn’t). For the first episode, we’re covering a topic that’s under the radar… if you’ve been under a rock. (It’s AI.) More particularly: is your team's AI adoption actually making your workflow faster, or just moving the slow part somewhere else? Our guest is CTO and 5FLOW President, Sriram Upadhyayula. He’s got twenty-five years in digital transformation, and a very direct take on where AI in packaging is actually heading versus where the hype says it's heading. If you're curious how the most hyped-up topic in tech actually plays out in packaging, this is a fun one to watch. Episode 1 drops July 13. First on https://www.5flowtech.com/, also on Spotify and YouTube.

How many different teams need data from your artwork files? "Can you pull the recycling claims for all SKUs in the French market?" - from the Sustainability team; or "I need to know which products have the 'dermatologist tested' claim." from someone in Compliance or, "Legal wants a list of all allergen warnings across our portfolio." And that doesn’t even cover half of it. Everyone's asking artwork managers to dig through files and pull specific data. That's not collaboration, that's your artwork team being slowed down, When critical information lives in artwork PDFs but isn't structured or accessible, coordination becomes manual work. What if the data in your artwork files was accessible to everyone who needs it, without anyone having to ask? How much time would your team save?

New regulation drops. Clock starts ticking. The question isn't whether you'll comply. It's how fast you can figure out which of your SKUs are actually impacted. For most brands, that identification phase is the longest part of the entire compliance process. Mostly because the data doesn't exist in a format you can query. Someone has to: - Manually open artwork files. - Review them one by one. - Extract the relevant information. - Build lists. - Cross-reference with product databases. - Check for exceptions. - Verify the data is current. - Hope nothing was missed. Meanwhile, the compliance deadline doesn't move. And the actual compliance work (updating artwork, routing approvals, coordinating with suppliers, scheduling print runs) can't start until you know what needs to be fixed. When critical regulatory data lives in unstructured artwork files instead of structured databases, identification becomes the bottleneck. Some teams have built workarounds. Spreadsheets that try to track which SKUs have which claims. Internal databases that someone manually updates. Institutional knowledge that lives in one person's head. But those workarounds break as volume scales. What works for 200 SKUs stops working at 2,000. And when that one person who knows everything goes on vacation or leaves the company, the knowledge walks out with them. The teams that respond to regulatory changes in days instead of weeks have one thing in common: their compliance data is structured from the start. When artwork data is queryable, identification becomes a search, not a project. How long does it take your team?

Les réglementations packaging vont-elle tuer votre productivité? Ce webinaire vous explique : →  Les 3 erreurs qui rendent chaque mise à jour plus complexe qu’elle ne devrait l’être →  Comment centraliser enfin vos données (textes, pictos, traductions) lors de vos modifications packaging → Et surtout : comment transformer ces changements en process fluide et scalable. Mais si c'est possible! (tous les inscrit(es) recevront le lien vers le replay) 🎤 Intervenant : Christophe Fourcroy / 5FLow -Wave 📅 Jeudi 09 juillet, 11h00 ⏱ 45 min 🌍 En français 👉Accéder gratuitement: https://lnkd.in/eH_47zpt

📢 Et si les réglementations packaging devenaient un levier d’efficacité pour votre entreprise ? Consulter notre article! Les marques et distributeurs le savent : PPWR, nouvelles allégations et directives… Les réglementations s’accumulent, et avec elles, les défis opérationnels. Mais et si, au lieu de les subir, vous les transformiez en opportunité pour moderniser vos processus ? Retrouver dans cet article une synthèse des "pièges" qui vous attendent dans la mise en place des nouvelles réglementations et la méthode en 5 étapes pour les dompter!

34% faster lead times across 30 countries, 10,000 suppliers, and 70 roles coordinating artwork. When a global retailer needed to manage approvals across that scale, juggling multiple tools became unsustainable as they grew. Teams lost track of where things stood and wasted time waiting for updates. They needed an operational transformation. One place where everyone could see what was happening. One system instead of scattered emails, spreadsheets, and messages. Here's what 5FLOW delivered: ✅ Complete visibility across all markets and product lines. Every stakeholder seeing identical project status in real time. No regional silos, no version confusion across geographies. ✅ Automated approval routing built specifically for their compliance requirements. Regulatory reviews happen in the right sequence, not in parallel chaos. ✅Full audit trail created automatically with every workflow action. When market-specific regulations change, they can prove exactly what was approved and when. 👉 Result: ~50% faster lead times. When you're moving that fast across global operations, every week counts. You've seen what this global retailer did with WAVE. Is yours next?