How do you create Declaration of Performance documents?
In the construction sector, you have to be able to produce what is known as a Declaration of Performance for most products marketed in the EU and the UK. Such a DOP document contains information on product performance and must comply with legal provisions.
1750 documents in 27 different languages
That’s one of the challenges Soudal has to deal with. About 1750 documents have to be created, published and managed in 27 different languages! And this just for DOP documents.
Until recently, Soudal staff formatted all these documents in Word. A time-consuming and errorprone job, as it turned out. When a greater variety of products were put into circulation in even more countries, the complexity increased rapidly. The further digitisation of this process could safe a lot of work.
This digitisation does involve some challenges, but the content and structure of DOP documents is strictly defined, making it easy to work with templates and enter the product information via a table structure. However, automating a process is one thing, collecting the right inputs and immediately exporting the output documents correctly is another.
Integrated technology stack
The Digital Data Publishing or DDP-Suite is at the heart of digitisation. Which ensures that InDesign templates are filled with data from the technology stack to generate DOP documents that are subsequently and automatically published.
The PIM or Product Information Management system organises and manages the gigantic pool of data and synchronises it with other applications in the technology stack. When a product specification changes, that change is immediately saved in the PIM and a new DOP for that product will automatically be published. The DDP Suite then ensures that this document ends up in the right place, e.g. via the CMS on the website, in the DAM or via mail to the right people.
The DDP Suite relieves you of the hassle, so to speak, while a PIM well-integrated with the technology stack ensures the accuracy of all information.
More than DOP documents
Soudal learned some valuable best practices during the collaboration with Catena and now relies on the DDP Suite for other publications as well.
Technical sheets and labels to be affixed to the famous tubes are generated similarly and fullyautomatically. That’s easy, because Catena made sure the entire marcom technology stack was nicely integrated.
The acquisition and integration of technology is a cost-benefit consideration that companies often put off for too long. It’s no surprise, though, because we are naturally afraid of disrupting existing processes, even if they are slow and error-prone. In addition, each employee or team also tries to solve its own problem. This means that bottlenecks are easily shifted to other departments.
Integration of the technology stack is therefore an absolute must. This is inevitable for large organisations, but also pays off for smaller SMEs. Companies today have to manage numerous publications, both for administrative and marketing & sales purposes.
Which publications are you concerned about?
Program booklets
Packaging
Technical data sheets
Product sheets
Catalogs
Labels
Quotations
Other
DOP Documents
Datasheets
Another challenge for our team?
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