With a range of around 21,000 products to promote, the production of marketing materials never stops. Pistor AG, based in Rothenburg, has been supplying bakeries, catering businesses and the hospital and care sector across Switzerland for over 110 years, supporting its partners in marketing, ordering, delivery and invoicing.

A central channel of this customer communication are the multilingual promotional flyers, published weekly. For their production, Pistor was looking for a partner equally at home in product data management and automated publishing. This is where we at W4 came in.

Time-consuming production of marketing materials due to manual processing

The real hurdle in data-driven publishing lies in the balance between creative design and fully automated, rule-based document generation. At Pistor, this long meant a great deal of manual work. Considerable coordination effort arose between marketing, product management, agency and external suppliers with every single issue. This cost time and produced errors, and approval cycles dragged on accordingly.

What was needed was a process that covers all layout variants of a given type of marketing material without compromising on corporate design.

Automated publishing with elytra PIM and Docscape

Together with Pistor, we first analysed the existing documents, workflows and data sources. Only then did we decide which steps to automate and which would deliberately remain manual. Pistor had been working with rule-based output since 2015. We extended this approach into a semi-automated publishing process with layout containers, in use since mid-2022.

The leading system is our elytra PIM. There, the Pistor team selects products, plans them ahead and links them with prepared layout containers to form the document structure. We developed the container principle together with the marketing team. The containers are designed once in Adobe InDesign; text and image frames carry the names of the data fields defined in elytra, complemented by header and footer, titles, tables and the product display. Export is as an IDML template, and the creative signature stays with the marketing team.

For document generation, we connected the Docscape publishing module to elytra. An XML rule set converts product and layout data into a dynamic layout and generates the finished PDF. Layers are shown or hidden per container, and text frames grow with the amount of text. Tables adjust automatically, and additional pages are created depending on the number of products. Every flyer variant comes from a single rule set. It is only modified when new layout functions are added.

We deliberately placed the final step in the hands of product management. Template, products and output parameters are selected directly in elytra, and the team triggers generation without any detours. Output runs on Docscape's open-source server; a licensed DTP server is not required.

The result: one rule set for every flyer variant

Layout templates are now created once and then reused in new contexts and languages. Product management creates and publishes the promotional flyers independently. Manual graphic work in marketing drops significantly, and the effort and cost of external agency services are eliminated. Because the data comes directly from elytra, manual transfers are ruled out as a source of errors. Approval cycles are shorter, and time to publication decreases.

Even at high volumes, there are no additional licence costs, for example for personalised or individualised outputs. The solution also grows with demand. Alongside the low-resolution PDF for newsletter distribution, the monthly issue of around 80 pages is now produced print-ready. Print versions for direct mailings and shipping inserts are planned, as is a self-service portal for Pistor's partners.

"The building-block solution created automated publishing that additionally enables flexible layouts with special cases. Marketing and product management can develop further layout container types and integrate them into the system independently of the software vendor."

Hubert Koch, Project Management, Pistor AG

Through the collaboration with W4, Pistor now has a marketing material production process that keeps pace with its product range and gives the team room to focus on content.