GRS Retail and GroenRijk, two large retail service organizations for garden centers, have optimized their content publishing processes with software from Graphit. With the WoodWing Assets image bank (formerly Elvis DAM) and this year a PIM system, the ingredients for a successful orchestration of content are present: the marketing campaigns are organized more efficiently and the webshop is optimised.
The challenge
Within the marketing campaign, GRS Retail and GroenRijk offer their members various marketing communications (including folders, advertisements, social media messages) in digital and printed form. GroenRijk also manages its own webshop. In order to be able to roll out the marketing campaigns properly, there are the necessary wishes. The webshop must be lifted to a higher level, designers want to be able to work more efficiently and the members of GRS Retail want to connect their marketing resources more closely to the local market.
In order to achieve this, various challenges have to be tackled, says Menno de Vreede, head of information management and automation at GRS: “We were looking for a central place where we can store all the images – without a server becoming overcrowded. Then you want to be able to find the material easily. These are two elements that greatly help our designers when working on the marketing campaigns.”
Within the marketing campaign, GRS Retail offers its members the option of tailoring the marketing resources to match their own garden center and their local market area. For example, it is possible to adjust the promotional sales price in the folders, extra pages can be added and it is even possible to put a specific product on the front page. To make this possible, visual material must be immediately available to the entrepreneurs.
With the help of the WoodWing Assets image bank and, in the future, a system for Product Information Management (PIM), all challenges can be tackled. Tony Meijer, workflow consultant at Graphit, has provided workshops about WoodWing Assets for the key users: designers, managers and technicians in a few weeks. “What does the software include? How do you ensure that you can find images again? What about the rights to the images?” By taking the input of the participants seriously, support was created for the innovation.
The result of WoodWing Assets
With WoodWing Assets, the designers immediately have space for 60,000 images, which are easy to find and which you can share among themselves.
All garden center entrepreneurs also have access to the system. It saves entrepreneurs time and budget to make images themselves, now that they can easily get them from the image bank. They find an enormous amount of images in the image bank. Freestanding images of plants and products, but also atmospheric photos. They can download these images directly and use them for expressions within the marketing campaign or use them in their own expressions. This gives them the opportunity to take even more control within their local marketing campaign.
Because WoodWing Assets runs in the cloud, the lack of storage space has been solved and the designers can work from home. Images and InDesign files are available. Images can be edited locally in Photoshop and previous versions are easy to find. In short, the entire process of content creation is arranged.
Graphit manages the software completely: backup, hosting and user rights. GRS Retail and GroenRijk don’t have to worry about that.
The result of the PIM system
After the image bank, the PIM system will also be realized this year at GRS Retail and GroenRijk. The product information in the PIM system can soon be used efficiently for the web shops. Moreover, the PIM system and WoodWing Assets complement each other perfectly: the images go to PIM, the product information to the WoodWing Assets image bank.
If everything turns out this year, all the ingredients for the success of a digital transformation – in which online and offline content are efficiently orchestrated – will be in place.
