STARK Case Study - Channel Studios

STARK

We were approached by clamping system manufacturer, STARK Spannsysteme GmbH, for a solution that would work with their Plytix PIM and allow them the in-house capability to produce product data sheets for their customers.

Based in Austria, STARK (within the Roemheld Group.), manufacture zero point clamping systems and vices of the highest quality and precision for international clients in the automotive, aviation and medical sectors.

The Challenge

STARK pride themselves on product quality that is based on the highest possible development standards, high quality materials and state-of-the-art machinery and processing technologies. This means they have lots of technical specification information they need to share with their customers that can vary by product.

Their product data is held in the Plytix PIM. This collaborative product information platform gives their team a single source of truth to easily store, manage, enrich, distribute and track their product information, allowing them to work faster and smarter.

The requirement was for a solution that would allow STARK to access their product data from Plytix within a design programme so their internal team could quickly and easily create PDF product data sheets.

The Solution

Creating effective product data sheets has in the past been a choice between having something automated but with generic content and is visually dull, or having something more product appropriate in its content and is visually nicer at the expense of automation.

Our solution combines automation, product content specificity and design flexibility.

Data sheets are typically a combination of descriptive text, images and technical specifications. For STARK, the diversity of their products means they are managing hundreds of technical specification fields with each product using a different relevant selection of those. Our solution works out which fields are relevant to each product and just delivers that information to the page. New technical fields can be created in their Plytix PIM without having to configure the product data sheet template or the pagination process.

The pagination engine is Adobe InDesign meaning the design capabilities of the world’s leading page layout tool can be leveraged, whilst the automation functionality means STARK can produce thousands of branded up-to-date product data sheets in a few minutes and export them straight to PDF, or even choose to tweak a few manually first in InDesign if preferred.

The Results

Following our template building and training, STARK can now quickly and easily create product data sheet PDF’s with information fed directly from Plytix, and output updated versions at the click of a button if changes are made.

Their completed data sheets can then be uploaded to a marketing portal for partners to access or imported back into their Plytix PIM and linked to products as assets, or just copied to their web server to be picked up by links from their web pages.