There are many flavours of web-to-print. A web-to-print application that you are hosting for a retail bank might be completely different from a web-to-print application for a wholesale customer. And supermarkets, with their specific database publishing needs, are another case altogether.
Digital Asset Management
A first good solution to offer to your supermarket customers is digital asset management. A surprising amount of them have little structure in their digital assets, and only very little tools to manage the workflows around them (approval, follow up of pictures, etc.). The marketing department of a supermarket usually is in demand of a good digital asset management solution. The maintenance of this solution usually is easier than for other customers. Rather than being faced with a yearly rush of images that need to be finished (for the production of the catalog), a supermarket can fill the digital asset management system on a weekly basis, for the creation of their brochures and folders. Each week ensures that the database publishing process will be a little bit smoother next time because a lot of the information is present already. The same applies for validation of the images. Once the digital asset management system is filled, the contents can be used in the database publishing and web-to-print workflows.
PIMS
Even more surprising than the need for digital asset management solutions, is the need for flexible solutions for product information management systems (PIMS). Surely, each supermarket has their own system. Navision, Axapta, legacy systems, and so on. But while these applications are very good for the logistics and financial needs of the company, database publishing or marketing workflows are not always very easy with this type of technology.
So providing a flexible content management system, where marketing information (including images from the digital asset management system) can easily be maintained, is often a very big bonus. The fact that it can be offered from a system that also provides database publishing and web-to-print functionalities is obviously even better.
Import/Export of data
But don't kid yourselves: getting the PIMS operational is harder than the digital asset management part. Because while you can influence a lot of the process in the digital asset management system, as far as the PIMS goes, you will be at the end of the line. The existing software will be leading. It will always remain the master database. So you will have to adapt to its quirks and way of working.
So you will probably set up a methodology for weekly imports into your own databases. These imports will provide the database publishing workflow with all the technical information for the products: prices, codes, in some cases descriptions and promotional information. On top of these, you will set up the PIMS, where the central marketing department of the supermarket can expand the product information with more marketing related information, to be used in the database publishing workflow.
And once you have this set of information, you will almost certainly be asked also to export it. To the existing website, to external agencies, maybe even to other database publishing workflows. It's up to you to decide how far you will go with this. But in most cases, at least an export of product information and low resolution images to the website is implemented.
Database publishing: the folders
Most supermarkets work with weekly or monthly folders and/or brochures. They provide you with a high amount of recurring prints, so offering the supermarket tools for the layout and composition of these brochures might not be a bad idea. There are a lot of advantages to an organized database publishing workflow for these brochures. Actually, too many to mention right here. I'll save them for a future post. One of the main things that are important here is that you will almost always want to use InDesign Server for this type of job. InDesign Server allows you to create an output of these folders which needn't be 100% complete. So after the database publishing workflow, you can still keep some resources in the studio to finish the end result. This way, you save a lot of time, but don't end up with a static end result (which is often the case in database publishing flows without InDesign Server).
Database publishing: POS materials
Next to the folders (which is more creatively minded database publishing), there are also the point of sales materials. Posters, flyers, shelve cards, stickers, and so on. Setting up production workflows for the automated creation of these materials saves a lot of time for you and for the supermarket. And by using InDesign Server, again, you can still retain the option for manual intervention. Out of 100 posters, the InDesign templates might suffise for 98. But the last 2 could be extracted out of the database publishing workflow, and changed manually. In most cases these exceptions could also be embedded as configurations in the InDesign Templates, but the cost of adding all exceptions would often be higher than the manual intervention.
Web-to-print: Online ordering
And of course you always still have the more standard web-to-print possibilities to offer. Supermarket employees going online in a web-to-print application to order personalized stationary supplies, on demand point of sales materials, and so on.
Some of our customers even go so far as to allow the end customers to have full control over the delivery of their complete point of sales packages. These types of web-to-print applications allow end users to enter profiles, or enter specific amounts for the printed matter that they will be receiving.