Kimberly Clark Corporation, perhaps the largest manufacturer of medical supplies in the world, sought a way to reduce the amount of effort required to create marketing materials such as catalog pages. Members of the marketing team spent hours locating images and manually rekeying product information from various databases, spreadsheets, onto QuarkXPress layout pages.
After acquiring another major brand of medical supplies that also carried hundreds of products, KCC had to find a way to manage brand consistency in the expanded catalog. A solution was needed that would streamline the involvement of product managers and merchandisers within the creative process, eliminate tedious double- and triple-entry of product information, organize all product imagery and improve the overall quality, consistency and accuracy of their content.
DPCI recommended that KCC leverage product data stored in SAP and brand image assets stored in the companys digital asset management system in order to publish catalog pages in print format. The customer had already been using North Plains TeleScope Digital Asset Management for many years but had not integrated the solution with SAP. With DPCIs recommended approach, KCC would be adding value to its existing investments in SAP and TeleScope technologies. DPCI built a powerful end-to-end solution, facilitating the re-use of creative assets, streamlining the production process and improving overall quality, consistency and accuracy of marketing content.
The Microsoft .NET application DPCI built merges XML data from SAP with images references in TeleScope to dynamically generate catalog pages derived from QuarkXPress templates. KCCs catalog publishing system is now used to generate annual and specialty catalogs with great ease and consistency. Further, KCC derives an unanticipated benefit from this application: In the past, it was unclear whether SAP held the most accurate and complete product information.
With the DPCI-created application, the KCC marketing execution team can now validate whether a given product set has accurate information. DPCI: Helping Fortune 100 corporations implement high-performance business systems for marketing execution.
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Working with DPCI on such a tight timeline to launch a site of this complexity has been remarkable. From the moment we began working with them, their attention to our specific needs and acumen for cutting edge technology has far exceeded our expectations.
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