Context
“Steel Korp Distribution” is an international company specialized in the manufacture of metallurgical products. This manufacturer has several subsidiaries and an e-commerce site for the sale of its products; it also has a network of over 300 stores in Europe. The company produces an in-house product catalogue every year and uses a graphics agency to manage production peaks.
The goals of Steel Korp Distribution
The goal was to:
- Fluidify PIM and DAM data management,
- Quickly generate catalogs using a collaborative and intuitive flatplan,
- Facilitate promotional campaigns in each of its points of sale.
The company undertook this project to optimize:
- Waste of time correcting documents,
- Promotional capacities of its sales agencies,
- Time of reactivity in the exchanges during the realization of the catalogues.
“Our sector is very competitive and very active. We had to present in a reliable way the detailed characteristics and the pictures of our products with studied prices in order to make the difference with our competitors. We did not have the possibility of activating promotions at any time, we had to confront in addition to that the problems of graphic design. The choice of J2S Store Publish-In is strategic, because the solution perfectly meets our goals and allows us to coordinate all our actions, even for our local offices”.
Steel Korp Distribution’s Marketing Manager.
The challenges of the Store Publish-In solution
J2S Store Publish-In was a quick choice. The solution seemed suitable to manage marketing data and make them available to agencies as well as to modernize the production chain of the product catalog.
The main challenges of the solution were the following:
- Centralize data,
- Manage specific product lists for commercial agencies and allow them to save time for their tagging and promotional actions,
- Increase catalog productivity by automating document layout,
- Produce documents that respect the brand’s graphic design,
- Measure and control the catalog production cycle (proofreading, correction…).
These expectations were accompanied by a challenge: seduce agencies with a sufficiently obvious and attractive web solution to avoid time-consuming training.
The documents are created with the Adobe InDesign tool, which itself uses fonts, images, illustrations… as many known objects of the “Graphic Arts”: tools and formats which do not enter the expertise of the commercial agencies. The specifications therefore aimed at an Adobe InDesign dematerializing tool, allowing to work on two types of data: product sheets and pages through an online flatplan.
The benefits achieved after using the J2S solution
Thanks to the deployment of the J2S Store Publish-In offer, the marketing department has improved several aspects:
- The reliable and fast production of its national catalogs,
- The studio has adopted the technology and masters its graphic design,
- The company is now freer and can react faster.
Thanks to the flatplan, Steel Korp Distribution easily manages its products and places them easily in its various documents. The “web to print” mode allows prices to be adjusted if necessary. The sales agencies appreciated the role played by the marketing department, which listened to them and offered them a real service: the solution enabled them to improve local sales promotion.
It’s still too early to determine the impact on sales, but one thing is certain: the company’s brand image is now reflected in all the documents published by the company.