Issue 4 - March 2009
Catalogue Production Using the Fully-Automated Quark Dynamic Publishing Solution
By Sandra Guiard
Versandhaus Walz GmbH, one of Europe’s leading specialist mail order houses, boosts its publishing processes using the QuarkXPress Server-based dynamic publishing solution Media DB.
As with many other mail order businesses, catalogue production at Versandhaus Walz was, until recently, a complex matter. It was not exactly easy to link together employees from numerous internal and external departments — such as reprographic companies, agencies, translation agencies, and photographers — for collaborative work on catalogue projects and provide each of them with the latest data.
Versandhaus Walz is currently the largest specialist mail order house in the Primondo Specialty Group. The company employs around 1,800 workers and runs more than 70 specialised outlets in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. The group operates under six brand names, the oldest and best known of which is Baby-Walz. The company’s catalogues are released in six different countries. It produces more than 50,000 layout pages per year. Two key elements in the company’s success are its high level of processing efficiency and its low operating costs.
Before Walz implemented the dynamic publishing solution, the five different catalogue areas were run by decentralised management teams — text and images lay scattered among photographers, agencies, and reprographic studios. There was no standardised procedure for backing up the images and text, and archiving was inconsistent. When the catalogue content was finished, the final text changes were entered manually, via copy and paste, into a media database so that they could be used in future projects. Editing a new version of a catalogue often required gathering images and text from a variety of old advertising material and manually recompiling the catalogue.
The more Walz expanded its catalogue business, the more apparent it became that the company needed a solution that could optimise costs and achieve faster production cycles. One thing was clear from the outset: the system would require centralised process management.
Walz contracted Softbricks, an innovative company that specialises in software for the media industry, to develop a dynamic publishing solution based on QuarkXPress® Server. The result: MediaDB — a central content resource for all of the Walz publication processes.
This dynamic publishing solution offers the complete, individual layout and design functionality of QuarkXPress along with server-based performance and the automation potential of QuarkXPress Server. "We used to work with InDesign® also, but now we only work with QuarkXPress,” says Christian Rast, Advertising Manger at Walz. "Our experience has shown that QuarkXPress permits layout processes of greater depth.”
MediaDB has been combined with the inventory management system that stores all of the product data. In MediaDB, this information merges with archive data from old advertising material, as well as with product text content, and can even be sorted according to product name, description, pricing — including the corresponding style sheets and product dimensions. MediaDB is also linked to the Xinet® WebNative® database used by a reprographics firm called Christ. The photographers upload their pictures to the database during the photo shoot and assign them to the correct catalogue page.
Based on text, images, product data, and the project geometries from previous catalogues, the entire catalogue layout is automatically structured and pre-configured — in a matter of minutes. Walz also handles its foreign language translations using QuarkXPress Server and MediaDB; translated text flows into the layout automatically. Conversely, data can also flow out of the catalogue and back into MediaDB so that the latest content, the corresponding style sheets, and the product dimensions are always on the platform.
Based on a single content resource, Walz produces catalogues, e-commerce, and advertising material, which is the very definition of genuine, automated multi-channel publishing. Internal departments and external service providers access this content resource. This ensures brand consistency at all times, regardless of the medium.
“For large projects, using copy and paste to transfer the final data from the catalogue into the media database sometimes took more than a week — thanks to automation, it now takes just a few minutes,” says Rast. “There’s no question that the system has paid for itself.” After just a few catalogue productions, the costs for the new software have already been recovered, thanks to the enormous savings in time and expense.
According to Stefan Sporrer, CEO of Softbricks, “The performance and stability of QuarkXPress Server are impressive. Because the development environment is based on industry standards, such as Java™, JSP™, ASP/.NET, PHP, and Visual Basic®, and protocols such as HTTP and SOAP, QuarkXPress Server can be flexibly integrated with existing IT environments. That’s why for our solution it’s about freely configurable components, rather than a rigid total system. We integrated only the modules that we use into the complete solution.”
At Walz, they’re considering expanding this automated workflow using a browser-based catalogue page-planning system that allows product previews to be placed on pages. QuarkXPress Server then automatically creates a QuarkXPress file that is based on the product placement for production purposes.
In addition, there are plans to use a Web-based solution to carry out translation processes through the Quark Publishing System® (QPS®) Web Hub (the editing workflow system within Quark’s market-leading Dynamic Publishing Solution). This is the dynamic publishing of the future!
