The times when web-to-print solutions were limited to businesscards and letterheads are long gone. With the current technology, most print providers are able to offer these types of services. So the competitive edge of web-to-print has moved on. One of the battle fronts is the integration with existing product databases.
Product maintenance
Any system can set up a product database. The real trick is to set it up in a way that nobody has to perform double maintenance. The end customer already has some system (Navision, SAP, legacy, ...), and you will be expected to integrate this. Using the DMP FLO Suite, you can actually do this quite easily. Setting up a database and importing existing data continuously is everyday business. And with it, you offer your customer the chance to create a second "master-database". Only this time, the main purpose is marketing activities.
Point of sales materials for supermarkets
A prime example of this is the web-to-print solutions centered around the creation and ordering of POS materials for supermarkets. Each supermarket already has a product database. But usually these are used for the main business of the store: selling things. And making sure that all of the logistics around that process are handled efficiently. The marketing aspect is often overlooked. And this leaves the marketing department with ... well, not a lot. Usually they work with Excel files. Hopefully they can create this out of the logistics system, but even that is not always a given.
Enter the FLO Suite. Printing companies allow the marketing departments of supermarkets to manage their product information online. Technical information is imported (often using those same Excel files), and enriched with manual input. Next week, less products need to be enriched. This way, a marketing database is set up over time.
And this database can be used for database publishing. Let hunders of products flow into templates with a single click. And when you're using InDesign server as the templating engine, you're still able to extract the 2 or 3 exceptions as InDesign packages for manual intervention.
Catalogs for wholesale customers
Similarly, but with different peak moments, wholesale customers can create their marketing product database for the creation of their printed (or online) catalogs. Actually, these types of catalogs are moving more and more from the realm of database publishing in prepress workflows to online web-to-print applications. Especially when basing everything on PDF templates or scripts, the catalog (or flyer, or restaurant menu, or contract, ...) can be generated in a matter of seconds. This allows for unprecedented correction and creation workflows.
Ads
And there are more variations. Embedding product information into online creation of ads ensures the correct usage of all technical and pricing information. And as such, it can be invaluable to some organisations. While not technically web-to-print (someone will print it, but usually not the hosting printing company), this is often added to the traditional web-to-print application, next to business cards, posters, etc. Sometimes as a free service (to make a happy customer), sometimes as a paid service.