About NCOI Group
NCOI Group’s mission is to provide people (young and old) with the best education and training. They thus facilitate ‘Lifelong Learning’ in the Netherlands. In addition to the best-known brand, NCOI Training, various renowned trainers are part of NCOI Group, such as Scheidegger, NTI, Schoevers, ISBW, Computrain, Markus Verbeek Praehep, NIBE-SVV, Pro Education, ISES, LECTRIC, Administrative Academy Netherlands and Luzac. NCOI Group has approximately 1800 employees and approximately 3500 active freelance professionals. NCOI Groep is preferred supplier for most of the Top 500 organizations in the Netherlands.
Challenges of the marketing department
The marketing department is responsible for recruiting trainees for all brands. Radio and TV advertising is used for this and the website and especially the brochures play a crucial role.
“Creating physical brochures is of great importance for bringing the training offer to the attention of those responsible for training within organisations. The brochures are developed specifically for this target group. The preparation and editing of all brochures was a very time-consuming process, which involved a lot of work. many different departments were involved”
Ferry Oil – Manager Business Transformation and Innovation – NCOI Group.
The old method
The training texts are an important means of promoting the various training courses on the website in a clear and attractive way. In the old method, all training brochures had to be ready before the texts about the training could be published on the website. A lot of precious time was lost as a result. Often the same content from different back office systems was used.
When preparing the marketing texts for the different brands, this similar content was reused in various expressions, online and offline, by means of copying and pasting. Corrections always had to be made in different places when a change was made. This was a very labour-intensive, but above all an error-prone process.
That is why a wishes package was put together to improve and simplify the brochure development process.
Wishes
• Being able to publish flexibly to both online and offline channels at any time.
• Reducing the time to publish new courses.
• More efficient layout and publishing processes by taking advantage of better and less error-prone ways to create content.
“Despite the fact that NCOI has several starting points per year, many students traditionally orientate on following a course in April and May. Partly because of this – and due to the large number of training courses that NCOI offers – there is great pressure on the process to be able to send the brochures in April.” – Ferry Oil
The preconditions for the solution
All content for digital and offline (print) had to be managed media neutrally, independent of the channel and independent of the brand. NCOI was looking for a platform to enrich its back office content with commercial texts and images so that they can be published to the relevant online and offline channels for the brand in question.
The chosen multichannel solution
After a market survey, NCOI has decided to develop a PIM (Product Information Management) system itself in which all product information such as the price, the product’s characteristics and the title of the training are managed.
WoodWing’s multichannel CMS and publishing workflow solution was chosen to enrich the content from the PIM and the planning system. The content from the PIM and planning system is displayed within the WoodWing environment and is enriched here with commercial texts and images that are specific to the brand. Using the “publication tool” all content elements for the print publications can be planned to the pages of the brochures.
The designers do the final editing of the layout, but they don’t have to worry about the content anymore. In this way, the layout of the brochures can be prepared with a high degree of predictability and flexibility within the shortest possible lead times.
“WoodWing is the director of the content. Woodwing orchestrates access to information and also ensures that Adobe InDesign templates are filled with content, information from the PIM system and planning information from our back office systems.” – Ferry Oil
Both the PIM and the CMS have statuses. If the content is set to “ready for publication” in the PIM system, the data is prepared for the various digital channels. Through pull, this content is retrieved by the CMS systems of the various brands of NCOI. Graphit has used a so-called content API for this.
The results
• A clear, time-saving workflow has been established for each training.
• Training brochures no longer have to be created and published according to a long serial process. In parallel, multiple activities can take place automatically more quickly.
• The NCOI Group’s design team receives fully automatically formatted pages for the various brands.
• PDFs of training brochures are automatically generated and placed in the right place on the website for future students.
• New content for all brands can be published on all channels at any time.
• Shorter time-to-market to bring training to the attention of the course participants at an (even) earlier stage.
“For this project we were looking for a partner with a lot of knowledge and expertise in omnichannel content creation. A partner with the willingness to delve into our processes, direct us and support us in the implementation of the content management and workflow platform. That is why we have had an intensive collaboration with Graphit for many years.” – Ferry Oil
