Laatste update: 20/11/2024
Prices are constantly changing, and price lists need to evolve accordingly. Updating these lists is quite a lot of work in your MarCom department. They have to ensure that the beautifully formatted price lists are updated again and again and remain true to the house style. Do you work with a dealer network? Then it’s a matter of keeping your eye on the ball at all times and acting fast to deliver the latest price lists to your dealers.
Finally: price lists have their complexities, which do not make your MarCom staff too happy. Time for automation. We briefly explain.
Changing price lists
Price lists are not usually just Excel sheets on some server. They are beautifully formatted documents, published digitally and in print – online, in shops and showrooms, for dealers, sales staff and end customers. And it doesn’t stop with 1 price list.
Take, for example, a company that sells 20 collections and brands through a dealer network in eight countries. That’s 20 x 8 price lists, another x 2 for buying and selling prices, which makes it 320.
With continuously changing raw material prices, it is currently common practice to update all price lists on a monthly basis. That means all 320 price lists are updated 12 times a year, a total of 3840 (!) documents are created annually in this company. This alone in fact requires a full-time employee. And what is worse, the marketing employee assigned to this task is usually not very happy about it. It is mostly numbing manual copy-paste work, which is also very error-prone as a result. That’s you?
An integrated publication process
Catena Company’s Dynamic Data Publishing or DDPS for short offers the solution by automating this process. Let’s have a look.
InDesign-templates
The designed price lists become templates in Adobe InDesign. With this, the different formats – e.g. for different countries – are already immediately available.
Links
These templates are then linked to the data available in various databases. Prices and inventory are typically contained in an ERP. For additional technical product info, that could be the PIM (Product Information Management) system. All images such as product photos typically come from a DAM (Digital Asset Management) system. When information is adjusted in any of those linked databases, all price lists are updated and formatted with 1 single click. Easy peasy.
Distribution & publishing
The distribution of price lists can also be fully automated. Publishing it on a website, sending it to a printer, distributing it to dealers and sales staff… It can all be done in a jiffy.
The magic of DDPS
The Dynamic Data Publishing Suite (DDPS) takes your marketing team out of the cycle of endlessly updating price lists and eases the burden on your sales department for rapid updates. Without accurate price lists, sales grind to a halt – but with Catena’s DDPS, you stay one step ahead. Not only will your team save valuable time, but your sales staff, dealers, and customers will enjoy a smoother, more efficient service. With DDPS, the content of your price lists is always error-free (as long as the linked databases contain correct input) and the design remains consistent with your brand identity. This ensures you come out stronger in the highly competitive ‘battle of the brands’.
The fact also remains that DDPS goes beyond automating the publication of price lists. You apply the technology in exactly the same way for publishing catalogues, labels, product sheets, technical datasheets, etc.
From creation to management and distribution, DDPS streamlines your entire content supply chain, top technology within Catena Company’s visual content automation segment.
Eddy Smets
Win the
battle of the brands
Start met visuele content automation
