Versioning brings big effects at PureRED in the USA
The background: PureRED (formerly GA Communications) has been offering pre-press services since 1967. Always on the cutting edge of technology, PureRED has evolved from a pure pre-press service to an integrated full-service provider for projects across all marketing channels – including creation, production and even execution of marketing activities. Today, PureRED serves a wide range of clients including some of the largest retailers and B2B suppliers in the US.
The challenge
With over 2,000 locations and 300,000- plus employees worldwide, the Fortune 50 retailer produces retail circulars as a major component of Lowe’s in-store marketing strategy. Each retail circular is a combination of good design, a consistent brand image, and creating eye-catching descriptions of products on sale.
Comprised of over 400,000 unique SKUs available in store and online, it’s no small task to create the multiple versions of circulars need to drive increased customer traffic. Each of the 9,000 brands with products sold by Lowe’s provide an enormous amount of data, totaling over 6 million images, logos, text descriptions and other business-critical information.
“We needed to find and implement a cost-effective and time-saving solution to automate multichannel services.”
The search
In a selection process lasting approximately six months, PureRED’s cross-functional “solutions team” issued requests for proposals to a total of 17 different providers of digital asset management (DAM) systems, marketing systems and database-driven workflow systems. The team then compiled a set of selection criteria, which set requirements for structure, technology and functionality, and finally whittled the selection down to a shortlist. Next, four finalists were invited to an online demo in front of an extended panel that included technical as well as operational staff at PureRED Atlanta, GA.
“Comosoft’s LAGO was the most innovative and useful solution we could find for our clients’ ever-growing needs.”
The solution
Comosoft’s flagship LAGO saves time and money by combining creative production software with web-based tools for planning and managing print and digital marketing projects in a single system. PureRED were particularly impressed with the following features of LAGO4: Versioning – through the simple and centralised management of intelligent templates, LAGO allows the appearance of promotions (including price graphics, logos, images, etc.) to be automatically changed to quickly create different versions of promotional pages. The “seamless integration of soft proofing and the production workflows”, which has placed LAGO “far above the rest”. The “superior user interface and structure and design of the LAGO system”.
The effect
Different versions within one template. With LAGO’s database-driven process, bellyaches regarding production challenges are a thing of the past. Thanks to the intelligent templating in LAGO, almost all content can be exchanged in a rule-based, dynamic and automatic way. In this way, many different versions can be created easily and quickly without any additional effort. This starts with images or logos and goes all the way to price formats and much more. For example, if a product is offered for $1.00, LAGO can automatically change the price format to 99¢ or even automatically create certain promotions such as 2 for $1 or “Buy One Get One Free” based on the defined rules and place them in the layout. This allows PureRED to create a wide range of designs and versions with a minimal number of templates. Problem solved.
Eliminate redundancies
With the LAGO system, product information only needs to be entered into the system once for the system to automatically create promotional pages. This frees up PureRED’s buyers to focus on other tasks.
Integrated workflows bring more flexibility
LAGO’s tools allow the marketing team to take care of their core task – advertising – while the buying team simultaneously organises product information and content – all in one central source. Various data sheets and workarounds are now history. The ability to update prices even just before print and create products in different versions – “all at the last minute” – gives PureRED’s clients “a huge competitive advantage”.
PureRED:
“We rely extremely on Comosoft’s LAGO for a highly efficient page creation process. With seamless integration between soft proofing and production workflow, LAGO’s user interface simply has an edge over all other vendors. We especially appreciate the configurability that allows us to customise everything to our exact needs. Our retail customers expect ever greater efficiencies – with LAGO we are able to deliver.”
Director of Advertising Technologies | PureRED
Hamburg, 2002