Calago: Printing Product Catalogs in Multiple Languages

Bosta is part of MegaGroup Trade Holding, the central organization for a number of technical wholesale trade companies in Europe and China. International customers can be supplied with goods quickly from local warehouses.

With Calago's expertise and support, MegaGroup successfully implemented jCatalog's Product Information Manager and Cross Media Publisher solutions together with RenderX's XEP renderer.

Bosta is part of MegaGroup Trade Holding, the central organization for a number of technical wholesale trade companies in Europe and China. International customers can be supplied with goods quickly from local warehouses.

MegaGroup's Bosta company connects OEMs, installers, and stockists to global supplies for swimming pools, pumping systems, and flexible and rigid, agricultural and industrial pipelines. To support their sales and marketing, they produce a full-color catalog in seven different languages each year.

There were several problems with generating catalogs for Bosta, and they can be summarized in four issues:

Long turnaround time

The main reason for Bosta to search for another way to produce their catalogs is that their previous method took far too much time and was inflexible, which delayed getting products to market and contributed to higher costs.

Inefficient process

The process was split into two inefficient work streams:

• The Product Data Management department decided which products had to be in the catalog.
• Another department, with much less knowledge of product data, had to manually maintain the products in the catalog.

The communication between the two departments was not consistent.

Fault sensitive process

The catalog was manually put together using InDesign. Added, changed, or deleted products in the assortment had to be manually maintained in InDesign, with a large risk for the introduction of errors.

High costs

The inefficient and non-flexible processes together with uncontrolled data quality drove costs much higher than they should have been for catalog production.

MegaGroup looked for a way to solve the problems. The challenge could be divided in three different points of interest:

Output

• 600 to 700 pages
• Full color
• PDF/A compliant
• Crop marks
• Bleeders

Design

• Automatic mirrored pages
• Use of images to bring attractiveness and fill white spaces on a page
• Possibility to determine which attributes have to be in the product table and rank these attributes
• Flexibility concerning use of colors, images for tables of contents and headers and footers
• Possibility to have a list of attributes instead of showing them in the product table

Process

• Runtime decreased considerably
• More user friendly
• Produce catalogs of the same product range in several languages
• Manage and maintain the catalog without third parties, except printing process

With Calago's expertise and support, MegaGroup successfully implemented jCatalog’s Product Information Manager and Cross Media Publisher solutions together with RenderX's XEP renderer.

Now:

• All product data is managed centrally for different countries in different languages.
• The solution provides a fully automatic publishing tool based on templates designed in XSLfast.
• The Product Manager can influence the design by using parameters and does not need any knowledge of desktop publishing tools such as InDesign.
• The exported PDF complies with the PDF/X-3 standard and is suitable for offset printing.

The project was very successful and the following has been achieved:

• The production time of the publishing cycle of a complete catalog has been reduced from more than a month to only one week.
• Using only one publication template, support of many languages, including English, German, Polish, Russian, etc.
• Influence on the design by using parameters, for elements such as:
• Headers and footers
• Images in the table of content
• Full bleed images

MegaGroup looked for a way to solve the problems. The challenge could be divided in three different points of interest:

Sample catalogs

Below are some links to catalogs in different languages, all produced with the same template:

• Dutch catalog
• UK catalog

Video

About

• Calago
• jCatalog
• RenderX
• Bosta
• MegaGroup Trade Holding