Keep formatted price lists up to date with a single click
The complexity of price lists
Inflation can be felt everywhere. Consumers are paying more and more for a full shopping cart and companies are seeing commodity prices skyrocket. With globally disrupted logistics chains, prices are not only rising but also very volatile.
It also has an impact on the workload of MarCom departments. After all, these have to update the beautiful, house-style price lists with every price change. Certainly companies working with a dealer network need to respond quickly 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 shops and showrooms, for dealers, sales staff and end customers. And it doesn’t stop with one price list. Complexity is increasing very rapidly.
An example
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.
An integrated publishing process
Catena Company’s Digital Data Publishing or DDP Suite for short offers the solution by automating this process.
InDesign Templates
The beautifully designed price lists become templates or stencils 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, this could be the PIM (Product Information Management) system. All images such as product photos typically come from a DAM (Digital Asset Management) system.
Distribution & Publication
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.
Advantages of the DDP Suite
The DDP Suite relieves your marketing staff from many hours of very boring work and from the pressure that sales staff put on them to provide updates faster. Because remember, sales cannot go ahead if correct price lists are not available. This means that your sales people, dealers and customers will also get a better service thanks to Catena’s DDP Suite. Besides, the content of your price lists will be error-free (provided correct entry in the linked databases, of course) and the format consistent. So your price lists uniformly breathe your brand identity.
Also note that Digital Data Publishing goes far beyond automating the publication of price lists. You apply the DDP Suite technology in exactly the same way for publishing catalogues, labels, product sheets, technical datasheets, etc.
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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.
