Milwaukee

• automate promotional flyers in FrameMaker in 14 languages
• based on an existing CMS
• but with organisation of the publications handled in xCS.content

Challenge

Milwaukee wanted to celebrate their 80th birthday in style. To do this they wanted a solution whereby all the dealers had access to a system where they could choose which products they wished to promote locally in the 8 page flyer that would be sent out to customers and prospective customers.

Approach

An extensive analysis was carried out covering aspects such as ser competencies, amount of data to be published, times at which the system will be most used, the data sources and of course the workflow required to coordinate all the resellers around Western and Central Europe and the central marketing department in Germany who has to approve the flyers before they may be printed.

Solution

In order to provide a solution to the challenge set, we begun setting up an envrionment in our standard X-Channel Solutions. This allowed to basic faunctionality such as data and user management. Buidling further on the standard features we made some custom development whereby we could offer a practical workflow.

First of all a reseller has to login to a dedicated website. Based on this login information we can detect who has logged in so that the flyers can be personlised with the right logo, coordinates etc. The reseller can then choose the type of flyer he wishes to build. He subsequently allocates the products to each page and our solution automatically adds corresponding accessories to these. Furthemore he can customise the way in which prices are displayes, for example both including and excluding taxes, or only excluding taxes. Once the reseller has completed these steps a low resolution PDF is generated and a user within the central marketing department in Germany. Once approved, the high resolution PDF is generated and delivered to the printing company for completion. The choice of printing company is another option in the workflow, should the document be printed at lower cost centrally or be ready quicker when printed locally.

Benefits

• Once central product information repository
• Access available to all resellers locally
• Publishing in 14 languages including Russian, Greek, Polish, ...
• Local resellers can customise flyers to the trends in their market
• Language information can be controlled by local resellers
• Faster production times of flyers
• Little human intervention in this production process.