Intro
MCR Safety initially faced its biggest challenge in the accounting department, which struggled with a document management issue. The company lacked a centralized system to organize and store hundreds of invoices and receipts. However, it soon became clear that the problem extended beyond accounting, affecting the entire organization. Locating the right assets, converting file types for various needs, and managing digital content was overly time-consuming.
In 2018, MCR adopted KeyShot Dock as its digital asset management (DAM) system, streamlining operations, accelerating time-to-market, and enhancing its omnichannel strategy.
Who is MCR Safety?
For over 45 years, MCR Safety’s motto has been, “We Protect People”. They are a leading manufacturer of personal protection equipment (PPE) for automotive, construction, metal fabrication, mining, oil and gas, and welding industries.
MCR Safety has +300 employees and sells its solutions through 1,500 distributors across multiple continents – North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia.
I chose KeyShot Dock because it is a best-of-breed digital asset management solution for enterprises. You want to be careful about all-in-one type products that do too many things at once. When you bolt too many pieces together into one system, you’re going to get a lot of things, but you’re not going to do any of them good.”
The Challenge
In 2018, Bret Lipscomb, Manager of Digital Solutions at MCR, set out to solve the accounting department’s lack of a document storage system for managing thousands of invoices and receipts. During his search, he discovered digital asset management (DAM), a concept he initially dismissed but later explored further.
MCR’s digital assets were scattered across storage drives, with no alignment between marketing, production, email campaigns, and sales. Files were shared via email, creating multiple versions and losing track of originals. This inefficiency made finding assets, converting file types, and adding metadata time-consuming, delaying distribution to their network.
With over 6,000 SKUs – each with multiple sizes, images, and 360° images – MCR managed up to 90,000 assets, including videos and action shots. Despite these challenges, the organization didn’t recognize the problem until Lipscomb demonstrated a better approach.
The Solution
When Bret Lipscomb took a holistic view, he identified the need to fix MCR’s content supply chain – from creation to management and distribution. This required connecting the organization’s Tier 1 platforms: SAP – which manages product availability and pricing, and Sitecore – which handles product marketing data. As a Sitecore developer, Bret prioritized finding a DAM platform that integrated seamlessly with Sitecore CMS.
The implementation of KeyShot Dock was a collaborative effort. The vendor helped customize metadata fields while ensuring no data duplication. Product attributes stayed in Sitecore, and pricing and availability remained in SAP. KeyShot Dock integrates with Sitecore, while SAP syncs with Sitecore via a custom job, centralizing product data, marketing content, and digital assets in one place.
This streamlined approach reduced asset sources from five to one, enabling marketing teams to save time and improve efficiency.
The Results
Reducing Manual Tasks:
The new system was met with mixed reactions. While younger team members embraced the change enthusiastically, seasoned staff were less receptive. Bret Lipscomb admitted the transition required persistence. “The lack of automation and duplication of efforts wasn’t enough to convince the older team members to change,” he said.
For example, photographers initially resisted tagging and linking assets, as it wasn’t part of their job. However, when they saw how one PSD file could automatically generate variations – like JPGs, high-res CMYK, TIFFs, or transparent PNGs – they realized the significant time savings from reduced manual work.
Accelerating Time-to-Market:
As a B2B manufacturer, MCR relies entirely on distributors’ e-commerce sites to sell products. To streamline content distribution, Bret developed a script that bundles assets efficiently. The script pulls pricing from SAP, metadata from Sitecore, and images from KeyShot, combining them into a zip file. Distributors can then access the assets they need directly through KeyShot Dock, ensuring accuracy and speed.
Expanding the Omnichannel Strategy:
KeyShot Dock plays a central role in supporting MCR’s omnichannel strategy, serving as a single source of truth for digital assets and product information across departments.
“That’s why we knew that whenever we implemented some kind of asset management system, it had to be a Tier-1 application because it was going to touch every aspect of the business from marketing to sales to distribution,” Bret explained.
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