guideline belgium - referenties

Victaulic wanted to develop their activities further within the European market. Therefore a solid solution based on a database with automated publishing was required.

Due to there being major differences in product assortment for each country, it was very expensive to maintain and keep these catalogues up to date.

A solution was required which complied to the following demands: on the one hand, they would need to be able to publish the catalogues with relative ease and at a low cost, while on the other hand, the complexity of the existing catalogue could not be compromised. A solution was needed with experience in this domain.

In search of this solution, Victaulic’s marketing department came across Guideline. As from the initial presentation they were pretty much convinced that X-Channel Solutions was the answer to all their questions and requirements.
The next step was a prototype, based on a number of pages from the then existing catalogue. This was prepared to convince the board of directors that X-Channel Solutions was the only solution able to handle these complex pages and structures. Furthermore a prototype offers the users a look into the future way of working and management tangible data to calculate time and cost savings that Victaulic will benefit from.
The result was of such satisfaction that they decided in record time to choose Guideline for completing this project.

Victaulic chose a solution based on X-Channel Solutions. Since the catalogues consist of many complex tables, they opted to use FrameMaker as the DTP package used. The data structure allowed for future expansion of the system, be it adding a language or another channel to which information is published to. Adding a language is very straight forward as the database fields have been pre-defined as language dependant or independent. Furthermore the fields only contain pure data, and the field definition determines the units of the data. This makes it easier to exchange data as well as add product search and compare features on a future website.

By choosing the X-Channel Solutions platform, the only thing needed doing was to enter the catalogue data into the database. Where possible this is done using imports, or in the worst case some manual “copy and paste” work must be done.
The immediate benefits that Victaulic realised were:

Translation of text is a lot cheaper since the DTP-cost per page has lowered to as little as 0,-.
Despite the data conversion being an enormous task, the end result was rewarding: the maintenance of data is a lot easier and the publication of the catalogues including indexes is now fully automated.
A total of six catalogues are ready for generation at any time.
In addition to the language capabilities, Victaulic takes full advantage of the measurement units that apply to each article, such as inches and centimetres. In using this feature, Victaulic is able to select the common system used for each country or region, independent of language.

Customer Quote

„It would have been impossible to generate our publication manually in six languages within the time frame required. Now we have found a solution, all language versions are made available simultaneously. This is a great improvement on the previous way of working. Now we want to increase the information in the database to include East European languages. Additionally we would like to use this database as the source of information for our websites.“

Pieter Gordebeke, Technical Documentation & Marketing, Victaulic Europe