New Module Available With Release of BLUE 3.5

DES PLAINES, IL - SGK, formerly marketed as Schawk, Inc., a leading global brand development, activation and deployment company, announced today the introduction of a business intelligence module for BLUE, its world-class SaaS graphics process management tool. SGK also announced the availability of BLUE 3.5, whose latest upgrade includes new features and enhancements.

"We have developed this latest release with direct input from some of the largest, fast-moving consumer goods companies in the world. The enterprise flexibility in our latest BLUE release will help drive brand performance, enabling global brands to route and manage packaging and marketing programs seamlessly across their complex global supply chains," remarked Scott Strong, SVP, global managing director of Schawk's digital solutions business.

The BLUE Business Intelligence module helps marketers make more timely and insightful business decisions by translating data into knowledge and knowledge into action, quickly and easily. It does this by drawing from the significant amount of data BLUE gathers about projects and timelines in BLUE's data warehouse. Through graphically-rich dashboards and interactive reports with data drill-down precision, BLUE presents data to users in a personalized way.

BLUE 3.5 addresses key challenges that users face to accelerate artwork approval cycles across global resource pools. It provides powerful integrated business analytics that allow customers to benchmark, analyze and optimize their processes, and seamlessly integrate their artwork management platform with existing ERP and PLM systems.

Key features of BLUE 3.5 include the dynamic decision engine, which automatically assigns users to tasks based on their role and location. The project initiator now simply identifies project criteria such as which brand, category and country the artwork is being created for, and BLUE assigns the right people to the right tasks. Critical for global deployments, where resource pools are hard to manage and constantly changing, this feature takes the onus off the project manager and lets the system manage the details.

The dynamic decision engine is tightly integrated with the BLUE Business Intelligence module. Once processes are configured to use the dynamic decision engine, reports and KPIs around project and task status, cycle completion times and top rejection reasons are automatically available for analysis and benchmarking.

Additional upgrades in version 3.5 include search enhancements, new views that make annotations and rejection reasons across multiple approval cycles available in a single click, better support for mobile devices, new web services, richer metadata support for pulling KPIs, and user interface and performance improvements. All of these upgrades help BLUE users accomplish more, faster, with the confidence of having the right data at their fingertips.

BLUE is a cloud-based software platform that delivers a set of global capabilities to help brand-driven organizations control and manage brand development and brand deployment assets and activities to drive brand performance. BLUE is a product of SGK. For more information visit: http://www.bluesoftware.com