Automated Catalog Creation with Web-to-Print.
The Austrian Windhager Handelsgesellschaft m.b.H. sells a wide range of products for a beautiful, high-yield garden and a more comfortable life at home. The product ranges from the areas of insect protection, pest control, sun and privacy protection and garden accessories are presented in extensive catalogues, among other things.
The Challenge
As the manual creation of these advertising materials is time-consuming, cost-intensive and error-prone, the company wanted a more efficient solution.
The Strategy
In order to automate Windhager's catalogue production, we used an intelligent web-to-print solution: The user-friendly open-source framework Pimcore is used to manage the structured product information and images for print and download catalogues. To ensure that this data can be imported into the desired catalogue layout in no time at all, we configured the Pimcore controller accordingly, created an HTML template and set up the mapping of the product data with the catalogue design.
Pimcore as Heart of the Web-To-Print System
In Pimcore all data for the catalog creation run together: The technical product data comes from Windhager's ERP system, which is connected to Pimcore via web services. Digital assets are stored in an external DAM database (CELUM). However, images and videos are synchronized between CELUM and Pimcore so that all assets are also available in Pimcore. All marketing texts are entered, translated and stored directly via the user-friendly Pimcore backend.
Using a PHP script, the EAN code of each product is converted into a barcode font
The HTML templates are output as print data (PDF) via the Pimcore backend
The Result: Catalogue Creation at the Push of a Button
The first project we implemented was a garden catalogue of over 200 pages using the Pimcore web-to-print solution, followed by a similarly extensive tablecloth catalogue for the Vénilia brand. Since a large part of the catalogue pages, including print marks, die-cutting, etc., can now be produced automatically, the effort and costs involved in catalogue production have been significantly reduced. The quality of the finished advertising material is in no way inferior to a manually designed catalogue. Changes can also be implemented quickly and without an additional layout program: product data can be updated conveniently at any time via the Pimcore backend and transferred to the respective catalog file.
