Fr.Ant.Niedermayr GmbH & Co. KG

Before it’s a weekly flier frenzy in your mailbox, it’s a project produced and managed in Canto Cumulus.

Challenge

You see them in mailboxes everywhere—fliers from grocery stores, hardware depots and countless other retailers. Ever think about the amount of work that goes into one of these? Every product on every page of every flier has a photo, description and price—and they must each be correct.

Fr.Ant.Niedermayr GmbH & Co. KG of Bavaria designs and prints millions of these fliers every week from a production pipeline that’s always in motion. It requires the timely collaboration of employees, agencies and customers, and because mistakes could be costly, mistakes aren’t an option.

Solution

Niedermayr chose Canto Cumulus because it offers the control the company needs to manage nearly 500,000 product images—not to mention descriptions and prices for each. The workflow is now streamlined, more accurate and—even better—Cumulus links to the ERP and SQL database systems the company uses to generate the XML they import into InDesign for “layout free” flier creation.

Results and Benefits

• Cumulus serves as a central portal to all product images, so no matter what’s needed, it’s easy to find.
• External ERP data linked to Cumulus ensures both systems are always in sync.
• Customers can browse photos online and easily choose which they want used.

Much more than mail

Every week, consumers find a fistful of fliers in their mailboxes, each offering weekly specials, new product announcements, coupons and more.

Millions of fliers; thousands of assets; hundreds of customers; one DAM system at the heart of it all—Canto Cumulus.

When you think about what goes into the production of these mailers, it can be mind numbing:

• Which products should be included?
• On which page should each product be featured?
• Which product photos does the customer want used?
• Where are the product descriptions and prices?
• How do we know the information is accurate?

Producing a weekly flier for your own company would be tough enough, but imagine doing scores of fliers for countless other companies, each with its own product lines, corporate images, content systems and, of course, approval authorities.

Then, just when you’ve got them all done, you start all over again for the following week.

“But the flier says 100% off!”

When you produce printed offers, you know how a simple ‘0’ can be the difference between sweet success and a miserable mess. This is why Niedermayr’s head of R&D, Peter Senkbeil, had accuracy in mind when he chose Cumulus.

Cumulus Web Publisher Pro offers advanced Internet access to any Cumulus catalog. Updates made to the system are always instantly available online, so Niedermayr’s customers always see the most recent updates and additions.

“Cumulus reliably provides the right images, and it does so around the clock, just like it has for us for more than 10 years.”

But in addition to reliable asset management, Mr. Senkbeil knew he needed reliable process management. Given the complexity of Niedermayr’s business, asset management was useless if the production process itself was broken.

Cumulus the nucleus

For starters, Niedermayr links each product image with descriptive data found in an ERP system so that the metadata in Cumulus is always as fresh as the products advertised.

Then comes the customer interaction. Customers can perform their own metadata edits, such as keyword assignments and selections, and they can also use Web browsers to determine which images should be used in future fliers.

Seamless system integration is key to Niedermayr’s workflow success, which is one reason Cumulus works so well for them. The ERP has the master metadata, but an SQL database ultimately generates the XML that’s fed, through Web Services, to an InDesign plug-in that performs the layout magic.

It’s complex workflow to be sure, but reliable automation and integration ensures Niedermayr meets the needs of its customers every week.

Easy “anywhere” access for everyone

Niedermayr’s customers appreciate Cumulus because it’s easy for them to use. Cumulus frees them from having to maintain their own in-house digital asset management systems, and it frees Niedermayr from having to offer technical support services, as Mr. Senkbeil explains.

“We didn’t want to become a support center, so it was very important to us that our customers understand the system immediately.”

Plus, customers have edit access to their metadata in Niedermayr’s Cumulus system, so ease of use helps ensure data accuracy and integrity, which everyone involved appreciates.

“You don’t need to be a programmer to set up Cumulus catalogs—it’s really easy.”