Keep formatted price lists up to date with a single click
The complexity of price lists
Inflation is being felt everywhere. Consumers pay more and more for their shopping carts and companies see the prices of raw materials skyrocket. With globally disrupted logistics chains, prices are not only rising, they are also highly volatile.
This also has an impact on the workload of MarCom departments. After all, they have to update the beautiful, house-style price lists with every price change. Especially companies that work with a dealer network have to be very quick on the ball and be able to deliver the new price lists to their dealers immediately.
For many companies, price lists are not just Excel sheets on some server. They are beautifully formatted documents, published digitally and in print, online, in stores and showrooms, for dealers, sales staff and end customers. And it doesn’t stop with one price list. The complexity increases very quickly.
An example
Take for example a company that sells 20 collections and brands through a dealer network in 8 countries. That’s 20 x 8 price lists, another x 2 for purchase and sales prices, cumulating at 320 in other words.
With the continuously changing raw material prices, it is currently common practice to update all price lists monthly. This means that all 320 price lists are updated 12 times a year. Thus, 3840 (!) documents are created in this company every year. That easily requires a full-time employee.
And what is worse, the marketing employee who is assigned this task is rarely happy about it. It is numbing manual copy-paste work, which is extremely error-prone for that very reason.
An integrated publishing process
Catena Company’s Digital Data Publishing or DDP Suite offers the solution by automating this process.
InDesign Templates
The beautifully designed price lists become templates in Adobe InDesign. With this the different formats – for example for different countries – are immediately available.
Links
Next, these templates are linked to the data available in various databases. Prices and stocks are typically in an ERP. For additional technical product information, this can be the PIM (Product Information Management) system. All imagery such as product photos typically comes from a DAM (Digital Asset Management) system. When information in one of those linked databases is modified, all price lists are updated and formatted with a single click.
Distribution & Publication
The distribution of price lists can also be fully automated. The publication on a website, the sending to a printer, the distribution to dealers and sales staff, … It can all be done in a jiffy.
Benefits of the DDP Suite
The DDP Suite frees your marketing staff from many hours of very boring work and from the pressure that sales staff puts on them to deliver updates faster. Don’t forget that sales can’t continue if the right price lists are not available! So your sales people, dealers and customers also get a better service thanks to Catena’s DDP-Suite. The content of your price lists will be error-free (provided they are correctly entered in the linked databases) and the format will be consistent. Your price lists will thus expose your brand identity in a uniform way.
Note that Digital Data Publishing goes much further than automating the publication of price lists. The DDP-Suite technology can be used in exactly the same way for the publication of catalogs, labels, product sheets, technical data sheets, etc.
Another challenge for our team?
Let’s talk about your project.
These case studies might interest you.
More tips & insights
Keep formatted price lists up to date with a single click
The price changes has an impact on the workload of MarCom departments. After all, they have to update the beautiful, house-style price lists.
