Sample solution: Production of paper catalogs

Starting position

Miller Ltd. produces a paper catalog of 400 pages once a year. The products are shown on approx. 370 pages, the remaining pages consist of the cover, table of contents and index as well as chapter introductions.

At the beginning, an external graphic designer receives a list of all products that are in the current edition of the catalog are to be included. The clerks provide the product information and photos to the graphic designer on request. There are a up to four correction runs to check the layout, product placements and technical data. Changes are drawn on a paper printout and checked/corrected manually by the graphic designer. The clerks finally transfer all changes to the ERP.

In total, a publication process like this takes almost 6 months. The managing director wonders how catalog creation should work in the future, because many customers also want a category catalog with individual prices. This would have to be done at the same time as the main catalog, however the budget is not big enough for a second graphic designer...

Solution

All data that is to appear in the catalog later is held in a product information management system centrally. The clerks continuously enter changes there - this ensures that only up-to-date data appears in the catalog.

The product pages are then published automatically at the push of a button using one or more previously designed templates. Customer-specific prices can also be adopted.

And the graphic designer? He can concentrate on the design of the cover and intermediate pages and edit the output manually after publication. The print template can then be sent to the printer as a PDF as usual.