If You Could Wish Yourself a Techno Solution by Katie Muldoon

If You Could Wish Yourself a Techno Solution…

by Katie Muldoon

You're walking down a deserted beach and you spot something that looks like an old lantern, the kind that makes a wish-granting genie materialize when you rub it. Thinking it's worth a shot, you pick it up and rub it. Sure enough, out pops a genie. Not your ordinary genie, though. This one is wearing a business suit.

“I am the Capitalist Genie. I will grant your every wish. Sort of. Due to these recessionary times, you have two, not three wishes. Due to the need to stimulate the economy, your wishes must be business-oriented, not something like having more money than Bill Gates.”

As luck would have it, you had been musing about some new techno stuff that could make your business hum.

Wish No. 1: A digital content management system that does more than just manage digital content.

Multiple channels can be so challenging. Knowing what is where, and whether or not the info you're using is the very latest, seems virtually impossible. Keeping the right people in the loop and planning ahead for multiple versions seems overwhelming.

But two software system makers, Banta Integrated Media (banta-im.com) and Pindar Systems (pindarsystems.com) have the solutions called B.media and Agility, respectively.

These companies have produced software that will let your suppliers, merchandisers and designers access a central data repository to create, manage and distribute information to any channel.

Because the central repository has been synchronized with the latest information from key team members, the data accessed is the most accurate and current. You can define down to a task what people can do and what info they are able to see. In addition, the images are entered in the system in a way that allows simple searching by keywords. Because it has full text search capability, any part of the description can be accessed. No more embarrassingly wrong SKUs and copy descriptions, not to mention prices, in your Web or printed pages.

For designers, these new systems mean that building pages will only take minutes because items can be easily dragged and dropped into Quark documents or, when using Agility, into Adobe InDesign. A quick click auto-updates with the most recent content. Another Agility feature artists will like is one that allows them to automate mind-numbing tasks like index creation, price merging and determination of space usage.

More time is saved since there's no more routing of paper proofs and the inevitable delays. Once the base catalog is created, you can turn out complex multiversion, multichannel and multilingual editions thorough updating links from the database.

Say you've been considering marketing to Germany. With Pindar's solution, you can access the main system from anywhere in the world. The German translator can log on to the system, make changes and then send them into a folder that's accessible only by the editor authorized to revise German copy. Design templates can then be layered for multiple languages.

Another wonderful attribute is that the software ties in with other systems that provide analysis and forecasting, media placement determination and where to best position an item on a spread. No more double- and triple-entering and uploading of data!

And here's something the merchants are going to go crazy about — a whiteboard system that lets them sketch out how they see the creative space allocation before the artists lay out the catalog. What a time and argument saver! Plus, with Banta's B.media system, the whiteboards created by merchandisers can be converted into Quark pages with a single click and all automatically linked back to the database. Pindar Systems' Agility boasts real-time capability of data stored outside the program. The benefit here is that your product managers will have the right information to make educated product decisions in the shortest period of time.

B.media also has a nifty feature called Page Sprayer. Watching it in action, you immediately understand how the name originated: Pages are automatically “sprayed” into a layout. No more laying out one page after another, often a tedious task in B-to-B books; sprayed pages just need artistic tweaking. The software “trains” the data being formulated into a layout based on the design and business rules you create, with an assist from Banta, and input into Page Sprayer.

“Are you blowing both wishes on these two systems?” asks the increasingly impatient genie.

You come out of your reverie and make it clear that both Banta Integrated Media and Pindar Systems' software have many of the same, wonderfully desirable attributes — so either you, or he, will be choosing one.

Wish No. 2: An automated merchandise pricing system that will let you know how and when to set prices for current items and markdowns.

Sound impossible? Spotlight Solutions (spotlightsolutions.com) doesn't think so. It's designed software that, according to a recent article in The New York Times, “analyzes sales data from past years and the current selling season, then determines which goods to mark down, at specific prices, and at specific stores.” It also tells managers, via the Internet, just when they should be taking the markdowns.

Saks, which has been using the system, feels it has helped improve its margins, notes the Times piece.

Other companies such as KhiMetrics (khimetrics.com) and ProfitLogic (profitlogic.com) use algorithms to help determine what to charge for products. These prices can change based on factors such as store location and time of year. Right now these systems are designed only for retailers, but all things are adaptable.

“OK, wise genie, choose two for me!”

And it was done.