How do you create Declaration of Performance documents?
In the construction industry, for most products that come on the market in the EU and the UK, you have to be able to submit a so-called Declaration of Performance. Such a DOP document contains information about the performance of the product and must comply with legal provisions.
1750 documents in 27 different languages
Soudal is a company that has to deal with this. They are responsible for the creation, publication and management of some 1750 documents in 27 different languages! And we are only talking about DOP documents.
Until recently, all these documents at Soudal were created in Word. A time-consuming and error-prone job, as it turned out. As more different products were released to markets in more countries, the complexity increased rapidly. Further digitization of this process could save a lot of work.
There are some challenges involved in such a digitization, but the content and structure of DOP documents is strictly defined, and that makes it easy to work with templates and enter the product information via a table structure. Automating a process, however, 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 the heart of digitization. It ensures that the InDesign templates are filled with data from the technology stack to generate DOP documents that are then published automatically.
The PIM or Product Information Management system organizes and manages the gigantic pool of data and synchronizes it with other applications in the technology stack. Whenever a specification of a product changes, that change is immediately stored in the PIM and a new DOP for that product will be automatically published. The DDP Suite then makes sure that this document ends up in the right place, for example via the CMS on the website, in the DAM or via mail to the right people.
The DDP Suite relieves you of the difficult work, so to speak, while a PIM that is well integrated with the technology stack ensures the correctness of all information.
More than DOP documents
Soudal learned some valuable best practices through the collaboration with Catena and now also relies on the DDP-Suite for other publications. Technical data sheets and labels for the well-known tubes are generated in a similar way, fully automatically. This is easy, because Catena integrated the entire marcom technology stack nicely.
The purchase and integration of technology is a cost/benefit consideration that companies often postpone too long. This is not illogical, as we are naturally afraid of disrupting existing processes, even if they are slow and prone to error. In addition, each employee or team is also trying to solve their own problem. The bottleneck is then easily shifted to another department.
Integration of the technology stack is therefore an absolute must. This is inevitable for large organizations, but also pays off for smaller SMEs. Every company nowadays has 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
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