Our client is world largest maker of insulation materials having their manufacturing and distribution operations spread across 40+ countries over 5 continents with one common purpose: to release the natural power of stone to enrich modern living. With such a huge footprint, our client realized if they wanted to stay close to customers they had to communicate in the local language. All their content ranging from product catalogues to marketing content had to be created in multiple languages to achieve their business objective of staying close to the people of the land. Modern day business also demands brand consistency and legal compliance across all their operations thereby making the task of language localization across their content even more challenging. Acheron and Chili in collaboration proposed to resolve this challenge to simplify the content creation experience and help our customer achieve their business objective.
Too many variants are not meant for creative designers
Creative designers generate templates for the product catalogues covering a wide range of products displaying technical specifications, product images and certifications of each product. Designers had to literally copy and paste details from a long excel sheet containing technical specifications exported from their product information management (PIM) application and also include corresponding product images and appropriate certification logos. These designs were being created using Adobe InDesign and Adobe Illustrator as appropriate.
Each catalogue has over 300 fields that need to be copy-pasted from the PIM export data. Now, with all of this, when it comes to recreating the same content for different countries and languages, the task had to be redone multiple times for each language and there are variations in applicable certifications for each country and region – the question is “why should a creative designer do this less creative content localization task?”. Furthermore, when there is a change in some technical specification or certification reported by the product team, again the updated PIM data would be exported and shared to the creative designers for updating the changes to corresponding product catalogues. The challenge was bandwidth (availability) of the creative designers to do such simpler content localization and updation tasks.
Creating marketing content for global audience with precise product information was very tedious owing to silos of data (PIM, Design Templates, DAM) and repeated manual design efforts spent on generating multiple language variants.
Automation alongside integration
Acheron understood the customer’s business case through deep discovery sessions and proposed a simple solution approach where smart templates can be created and managed inside Chili GraFx publisher. Smart templates are template variants that can be configured with multiple variables having dependant fields and labels populated based on business needs. We had a deep understanding of this dependency logic between products and corresponding technical specifications and had configured smart templates depending on product category, region, language and various other factors defining the final output content. Further integrating their PIM to the smart templates enabled fetching the technical specification directly from their PIM so that data was always consistent and compliant.
Creative designers were required to create templates with base layout and content in just one language and tie those to corresponding product ID inside the PIM – the other variants in terms of language, certifications and compliances could be quickly and easily fetched based on selectable dropdown fields which the sales and marketing users themselves can select to generate the corresponding localized content for further downstream consumption and promotions.
Managing templates on Chili GraFx publisher along with integration to PIM and DAM applications enabled automation and eliminated expensive designer efforts for generating simpler language variants.
Improved brand reputation and reduced creative design efforts
The marketing and sales teams spread over 40 different countries across 5 continents are now able to access brand consistent and regulation compliant product content in the language of their choice without having to wait for a creative designer to update and deliver content tailored to the region from where they are operating. This implementation significantly improved the time to market for product catalogues and marketing content and reduced 1800 man days (8 hours per man day) of expensive creative designers in the whole process. Our customer was able to achieve their global expansion plans without compromising quality, compliance and brand consistency across their products thereby increasing brand reputation internationally.
