Author: Elia Santagiuliana

In short, a job that is often really depressing.

Depending on the type of company you work for and depending on the quantity of products on the list, you will surely find struggling with a more or less extensive catalog.

Very often, the creation of the catalog is an operation that requires time and precision.

But one thing is certain: nobody wants to waste time updating and editing descriptions and images by hand.

Every time you find yourself having to do a job like this do you feel like putting your hands in your hair?

Hundreds if not thousands of information, data, numbers, words and images that you have to manage by hand.

Always the same old story: search, cut, paste, replace.

Wake up from the nightmare

The production of a catalog is always a special moment of the year for a company’s Marketing Department. The catalog is the synthesis of the activities of various corporate bodies and creating it is often difficult, sometimes a moment of anxiety since the delivery times are defined but the times to collect the data, validate them and make them understandable to the user are anything but defined.

When the Ekr Orchestra method is introduced in the company, the scenario changes completely, all information begins to flow within a single Ekr-Pim Repository and the various Information Owners, even at different times, can create, update and delete the information and this will be reported in the catalogs in a completely automatic way.

Then, the Marketing Department will undertake to manage the various versions of the catalog, the various specific configurations for each market and will build the geometry of the pages. At the same time, much of the information will flow automatically from the Technical Department or from the Product Managers who, through a particular mode of interaction with our PIM system, will collect information of different types that will be aggregated into a single object that we call SmartDocument.

From the same SmartDocument of the catalog it is possible to obtain several dozen catalog variants, variants by language, by configuration, by industrial target up to obtaining specific catalogs for single user groups.

Request a meeting with an Ekr consultant to understand the benefits that your Marketing Office could derive from the introduction of Ekr-Pim regarding catalog management, so that it is no longer a difficulty to be circumscribed.

PIM vs PLM

What are the differences between PIM and PLM? This is one of the questions we hear frequently when starting a dialogue with a client who is considering introducing Ekr Orchestra, a method that is based on Ekr-Pim technology. PLM (Product Lifecycles Management) is a system dedicated above all to the creation of the product, therefore all the information necessary to ensure that the Technical Office designs the product in the most efficient way and that the interaction between the design and business objects of the IRP are always aligned. The goal of PLM is to ensure that the product is industrialized with maximum efficiency and that its costs are always aligned with business objects, components to be purchased, components to be produced, which have a defined cost. Sometimes documentary elements are also included within the PLM which, however, are to be considered as information aggregates that are not easy to distribute in a granular way.

Instead, PIM is a system often at the end of the PLM system, which allows you to collect all the information describing the finished product, such as the final technical characteristics, operating characteristics, operating modes or even more generic information such as guarantee, description of functional processes up to more specific information such as troubleshooting, maintenance procedures, maintenance tables or in the marketing field, information such as images, emotional images, detailed images, explanatory videos and so on.

This is the fundamental difference between PIM and PLM: PLM is used to build the product, PIM to collect the product information to be distributed to the world.

Renewing the price lists should be a quick and painless operation

We often find ourselves doing things that are not at all useful for our purpose.

An American anthropologist, David Graeber, has written a book entitled bullshit jobs – translated into “cabbage jobs” in the subtitle of the Italian edition published by Garzanti. The book gives some examples of jobs, including paid jobs, which are totally useless, superfluous or harmful, which not even those who carry them out can justify their existence, even if they feel obliged to pretend that they are not.

YouGov, a company that presents survey panels, asked Brits in 2015 if they thought their work contributed positively to the rest of the company: 37% said no, while 13% were unsure.

Here, the fundamental point of the article is just this: doing price modeling using only Excel sheets is useful and effective when going to a meeting on the other side of Italy to discuss a detail, in the era of videoconferencing.

The ubiquitous Excel, which revolutionized accounting in the 1980s, has not kept pace with the needs of modern corporate units. Errors can come up because the data in Excel is separate from other systems and is not updated automatically.

Translated: waste of time and decrease in the effectiveness of the activity.

Business success is determined by innovation

The term industry 4.0 refers to the set of tools and trends in industrial automation that integrate new technologies with the aim of improving working conditions by increasing productivity and quality in the plants.

The origin of the name and of the same philosophy can be traced back to a German project, which included investments in infrastructures, schools, energy systems and research centers to modernize the production system.

The term 4.0 indicates what many consider the fourth industrial revolution.

EKR Orchestra is perfectly suited for both Technical Documentation and Marketing.

Its extreme flexibility allows you to connect to any type of ERP system, any complex and extensive Excel document and KEEP the link with it.

The main function of EKR Orchestra is to provide the correct information wherever you need it: from InDesign to the PDF document, from the ERP to the Web Portal, to the Marketplace, you will find what is right for you.

But keeping a product catalog updated involves a mountain of problems …

In an increasingly digitalized global scenario, the retail sales market is increasingly oriented towards providing integrated purchasing services also online.

Companies wishing to sell their products must necessarily have an e-store where users can access the products in the catalog, obtain quality information, and be able to place orders.

To date, 50% of the world population makes part of their purchases on the online platforms, and this percentage is also growing rapidly in Italy.

Stop going crazy in the search for information

the Technical Office of companies is often employed in an activity with low added value. We call it “the information hunt”.

Imagine the editors of the technical documentation office: how long does it take them to go to other design offices or to R&D to ask the various designers for information on what they have generated and which must be documented by them?

Or the product marketing manager looking for the exact characteristics of a product to document it on online and offline marketing tools and provide all the correct information to potential customers.

How much time is lost!

The time of those who seek and cannot find, the time of reflection of those who, in the technical office, have to interrupt their activities to give answers to colleagues.

This activity can be eliminated by introducing a method: the EKR Orchestra® method.

This method ensures that those who produce the information, the information owners of the various technical departments, collect it in a single, perfectly organized point, with every single data labeled, so that the whole company, primarily the documentation office technical, can find that information without asking for it, without the possibility of ambiguity, without doubts about its “quality”.

And that same information can also be a secure source for the marketing department, which must document the product by communicating its characteristics and values.

The activity of “hunting information” – absolutely a waste of time for the company – must be banned.

A typical example of a hunt for unsuccessful information is the activity of copying / pasting from one document to another: I open the Excel that the technical office did and start copying some data from the tables, then from an email from the product manager I copy some information and put it in the manual and so on.

It seems the simplest and most obvious thing in the world! But it is a high-risk information distribution process. In fact, who can guarantee that the data copied yesterday, today has not been originally modified?

Activities of this kind must be reduced to zero to make the process of creating, updating, distributing the data produced by the technical office to the technical documentation office and the marketing office fluid and “guaranteed from the origin”.

To make this process much more efficient and absolutely more effective we have created EKR Orchestra®. The method that allows you to bring this new evolution into the company.

With EKR Orchestra you can easily get all the types of offline documents needed to be close to your client :

Discover Ekr Orchestra

EKR orchestra is a working method that EKR has invented and tested in ten years of presence on the market. it is intended for companies that produce many varied products or companies that produce few but very complex products. EKR consultants teach the technical and marketing departments how to best manage their product information in order to obtain the best results from it.

On the technical office front, the product information must be above all unambiguous and can be interpreted in various ways by an end user, for example, who uses it in a technical manual or in general in a technical document.

On the marketing front, the information must be precise but also extensive and sufficiently articulated so that a person who encounters the information distributed through a catalog, a price list, a brochure, a site or in any case any information distributed through aggregation portals such as many European portals or even Amazon itself, is complete and unambiguous and that allows a conscious and adequate choice of the product to be purchased

EKR teaches the company how to organise the process of creating, updating, and distributing information effectively and efficiently.