Executive summary
- ABOUT PFEIFFER CONSULTING
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Pfeiffer Consulting is an independent technology research institute focused on the needs of publishing, digital content production, and new media professionals.
- ABOUT THE RESEARCH
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Aim of the research
The aim of this research project was to measure the impact of Adobe Creative Suite 4 on the productivity of the creative workflow, to assess evolutions of design, publishing, and media production tools, and to present segment-specific return on investment projections based on the data collected during the research.
Technology and market analysis
In addition to the analysis conducted specifically for this project, this report also draws on several independent studies and research projects conducted by Pfeiffer Consulting, as well as independent market analysis published in the Pfeiffer Report on Emerging Trends and Technologies.
Benchmarks
Productivity measures, based on the Pfeiffer Consulting methodology for productivity benchmarking, compared workflow productivity based on Adobe Creative Suite 4 with previous releases of the software. Benchmarks separately covered four specific market segments: design, digital imaging, web and interactive design, and video production. More than 100 individual benchmarks were conducted when this document was compiled.
Return on investment (ROI)
ROI projections based on the productivity data collected for this research project were established for each individual market segment. These projections were obtained by mapping productivity gains linked to features and efficiency enhancements introduced with Adobe Creative Suite 4 to likely rates of repetition of common operations observed in creative workflows. This executive summary presents the key results for these ROI simulations.
- FOR MORE INFORMATION
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To review the detailed findings, visit www.pfeifferreport.com.
Adobe Creative Suite 4: Market Perspectives, Productivity, and Return on Investment
KEY FINDINGS
New features and efficiency improvements of Adobe® Creative Suite® 4 software provide significantly increased productivity over previous releases and significantly improved integration among different media types and delivery methods.
Adobe Creative Suite 4 is the first mature integration of Adobe software such as Adobe Photoshop® with Macromedia technologies like Flash® Professional, Dreamweaver®, and Fireworks®.
Increased productivity of Adobe Creative Suite 4 can provide an ROI of several thousand dollars per workstation per year.
Technology analysis: What Adobe Creative Suite 4 brings to the market
Increased productivity
As the productivity benchmarks for this project document, Adobe Creative Suite 4 increases efficiency in a vast variety of operations, including many routine, everyday production tasks.
Mature integration of Macromedia tools
Adobe Creative Suite 4 brings the first true integration of Flash, Dreamweaver, and Fireworks with the rest of the Adobe tools, supporting Photoshop Smart Objects within Dreamweaver CS4, as well as tight integration between Adobe InDesign® and Flash, and Adobe After Effects® and Flash. This results in a significantly streamlined workflow for multiple media content delivery.
Sophisticated web tools for designers
Flash CS4 offers a redesigned user interface and tight integration with other creative and design environments within Adobe Creative Suite 4. In addition, Fireworks CS4 is the first design-oriented tool that bridges the gap between the design and web tools, by exporting formatting information in CSS without specific intervention from an expert.
Ubiquitous metadata
Adobe Creative Suite 4 offers pervasive and streamlined metadata support, and pushes metadata usage to new levels, particularly in video workflows, by supporting speech-based video search.
Integration
Integration between individual applications of Adobe Creative Suite has been significantly enhanced, by providing a Dynamic Link between applications such as Adobe Premiere® Pro, After Effects, and Encore® CS4, and by enabling Flash output from a variety of products. In addition, Bridge CS4 provides a powerful management environment for the increasingly complex variety of data and metadata creative professionals manage.
Productivity benchmarks: Overview of the results
The productivity benchmarks were based on real-world tasks and assignments, and individually covered each of the major market segments addressed by Adobe Creative Suite 4.
Significant productivity improvements can be found in a wide range of application areas ranging from a more efficient user interface for managing multiple windows, to improved interactive design options such as Smart Guides. For example, managing multiple windows in a design project is on average more than twice as fast as in older applications.
Workflow enhancements that show significant (and in some case spectacular) productivity increases can be found in every major application area, such as Live Preflight in InDesign CS4, native CSS export from Fireworks CS4, Live View and Live Code in Dreamweaver CS4, Adjustment and Mask panels in Photoshop CS4, and support for tapeless video formats in Adobe Premiere Pro CS4, among many others. Refer to the complete benchmark report for detailed results.
ROI projections: The impact of Adobe Creative Suite 4 on productivity
The cumulative effect of small productivity gains in everyday operations is almost universally underestimated. This is particularly true in deadline-driven environments. A simple productivity enhancement such as Smart Guides (introduced in several CS4 applications, such as InDesign CS4 and Fireworks CS4, and enhanced in Illustrator CS4) can save five or ten seconds each time they are used. Repeated just twenty times a day, this saves a designer close to an hour per month.
And we are only considering a single isolated (and seemingly minor) feature. Benchmarks conducted for this project show that Creative Suite 4 makes dozens of everyday tasks significantly faster; as a result, the overall experience of using these new releases is clearly smoother and ultimately faster than working with older versions.
Pfeiffer Consulting has analyzed the data from the productivity benchmarks to establish the impact of productivity gains on return on investment. The ROI projections derived from the cumulative effect of these productivity gains can easily reach thousands of dollars per year per workstation even when only some of the new features are taken into account.
Adobe Creative Suite 4 increases the productivity of average users by providing efficiency gains in a large number of everyday operations. The ROI can easily reach thousands of dollars per workstation per year. These ROI projections have been established for each individual market segment covered, and show that significant ROI can be derived from productivity gains in every one of them. In some workflow situations, the ROI impact of Adobe Creative Suite 4 can be in excess of $10,000 per year per workstation.
