DAM products and their relation to data management and GDPR

As businesses become increasingly reliant on digital assets, managing data and ensuring its privacy has become more important than ever. One of the ways companies are doing this is through digital asset management (DAM) systems, which can store and organise vast amounts of digital files. However, as these systems become more sophisticated, they can also become more complex, and managing the privacy of the data stored within them can be a significant challenge. This is where a GDPR manager comes in.

• The GDPR, or General Data Protection Regulation, is a European Union law that sets out guidelines for the handling of personal data.
• This law applies to any company that processes personal data, regardless of whether it is located within the EU or not.
• The GDPR manager is responsible for ensuring that a company’s DAM system is in compliance with this law.

Digital asset management (DAM) systems are becoming increasingly important for businesses that deal with large amounts of digital files. However, with this increased use comes a greater need for data privacy and compliance with regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). To address this need, some DAM systems include a GDPR manager tool that allows companies to manage consent for individuals who appear in photos uploaded to the DAM.

How Papirfly’s DAM can ensure company compliance to GDPR

The GDPR manager in our DAM enables users to create “photo sessions” and handle consents from the individuals depicted in the photos. These individuals are referred to as “data subjects” under the GDPR. The GDPR manager tool allows users to store information about data subjects and their consent status, providing a consent overview that displays a list of all persons who have confirmed consent or are pending.

The GDPR manager’s primary responsibility is to ensure that the company is collecting and storing personal data in compliance with the GDPR. This means that data must be collected for a specific purpose and individuals must be informed about the collection and use of their data. The GDPR manager tool allows users to easily manage consent and ensure that data subjects are aware of how their personal data will be used.

The GDPR manager tool also allows users to monitor the consent status of data subjects and track any changes in consent over time. This is particularly important in cases where individuals withdraw their consent, as companies must ensure that the data subject’s personal data is removed from the DAM system in a timely manner.

Finally, the GDPR manager tool can be used to provide training to employees on GDPR compliance as it relates to the handling of personal data in the DAM system. This may involve providing guidance on how to manage consent and how to respond to requests from data subjects regarding their personal data.

GDPR compliance is key in digital asset management and consent management

The GDPR manager tool in our DAM plays a crucial role in ensuring that companies comply with the GDPR when handling personal data. By providing an easy-to-use tool for managing consent, tracking changes in consent status, and providing training to employees, companies can ensure that they are protecting the privacy of data subjects and avoiding any potential breaches of the GDPR.

A template is not just a template

A “template” can cover a lot of area and be as simple or as complex as you need it to be. It can be a simple “change the name and address” ad all the way to using advanced layout engines to make multi-page documents of various sizes and pull information and images from integrated databases.

Pay now or pay later

Everything is a compromise and has trade-offs. Simple templates can be made in minutes by a designer, but more complex, bespoke templates can require over one hundred hours for a developer to create in order to implement all the logic. So when does spending 100x more time on a bespoke template make sense?

A simple template can produce simple outputs — there can be variation in content, but little more. A complex, bespoke template can handle many variations in centrally controlled messaging, languages, colours themes, brands, layout logic and sizes. Using the formula of (conservatively) five of each possible variation, a complex, bespoke template can output 5^5 variants (i.e. 3125 variants)! Even just a handful of colour variations combined with sizes can output 20-30 variations, making the numbers of hours to implement quite valuable.

By investing in and utilising complex, bespoke templates, you have the ability to update the templates as your brand evolves over time, ensuring that all of your present and future templates are consistently up to date. This feature provides an added level of simplicity and a return on investment, making it easier to maintain brand consistency and coherence across all of your materials, while giving you time back on creating simple templates for every possible variation.

Production time is also time spent

It’s the total cost that counts, and while you may be saving on template creation, that helps little if those savings result in more time required by end users (who are potentially not designers) to actually create collateral. Many simple templates can do the same job as a more flexible bespoke one, but what are the trade-off?

Imagine you create a few social media (SoMe) posts for Facebook and LinkedIn. Using simple templates for either, you can quite easily copy and paste the text, choose the same image, and crop the image to fit the size requirements defined by Facebook and LinkedIn. The post will be done in less than ten minutes, but will require the knowledge of how Facebook and LinkedIn limit posts (in terms of size, length of text, etc.). If you compare that process to a flexible, bespoke template where you can select new size (already set-up with the size requirements of the SoMe platform), verify that the text still fits, and “save as new”. This process was done in less than a minute.

While each individual task does not save that much time, everything counts in large amounts. With an organisation that produces hundreds of SoMe posts per week across all locations, the savings become significant. Not only are you getting a significant return on investment, you’ll have happier, more efficient employees who will have spent less time on cumbersome processes and more time on more important work.

Papirfly goes above and beyond by offering an additional time-saving feature: continuously and proactively monitoring sizes of various social media channels. With this approach, you can rest assured that all of your social media templates are consistently up to date, ensuring that your brand is always represented accurately and consistently across all channels.

Create templates without InDesign

Everyone starts their exploration of templating systems somewhere, and it’s natural to assume that creating templates from InDesign or similar design tools is the best way to go. In some cases that would be correct – e.g. if your need is to produce a vast quantity of very different templates that need only a few edit options, and you have designers that know your brand well.

Another appropriate use case for a design tool like InDesign may be that you need to provide end users with many SoMe and/or print templates, where the content — text and imagery — varies. In this case, using one bespoke template to create all needed variants could be the quickest way to reach the goal. Creating content variants with Papirfly’s Create & Activate product (and the amazing products we can wrap around it) is literally as easy as editing a document, where an administrator (non-designer) can easily create a content variant in minutes. The best part is that the end user gets the same quality, bespoke user experience (UX) in each and every one of these templates.

If you require more control over how these templates are used (e.g. locking the background image or heading), we provide solutions for this as well. Template creators can have additional granular controls that let them lock elements down, to the extent that even which parts of the element are editable. An image element can, for instance, be set to fill its frame and the end user can only select images from a specific set of predefined backgrounds. When the template creator has approved the final version of the template, the template is immediately available for the end user.

So what about InDesign?

An InDesign document is a static design, but allowing for different amounts of text and various images requires careful thought and design, as design for dynamic content is important, but easily overlooked.

InDesign to template offers a very quick way to distribute templates throughout an organisation, but the use cases are narrow. The lack of flexibility in designing for content makes it mostly appropriate for stamping logos or addresses on locked designs.

Bespoke templates can be so much more than InDesign-based templates. It may seem like a template is a template, but the value of flexibility and easy-to-use bespoke templates offers should not be underestimated.

• Enormous amounts of combinations of sizes, layouts, colours and brands.
• Keep content intact when changing the above allows for quickly and efficiently pushing out variants for wider use
• Keep content aligned when your brand is updated, as bespoke templates be changed in terms of logo, font, colours, etc. (e.g. when opening a document saved with an older version, the document is updated to the latest version of brand)

Additionally, bespoke templates can have bespoke integrations with external data sources and use them intelligently. Whereas Chili templates can only simply replace text and images, bespoke product elements can react to the content, which allows for a larger range of settings and change in size and proportions while staying effortlessly on brand.

An InDesign file can become a template in minutes, but it is restricted and not a truly usable template. To implement a template that requires a text size change that moves elements and shifts the content around of the template around, the customer either needs trained staff (~2% of our customers) or consultant to do the implementation — exactly the same as with a bespoke template. With bespoke development, all templates are packed into a single application that shares fonts, text styles, colours, etc. This means that the second template will be drastically faster to implement than then first.

Templates that empower

Design templates are more than just InDesign files; they are powerful assets that drive creative excellence, operational efficiency, and brand consistency. They provide a roadmap for crafting visually stunning marketing materials, from landing pages to social media graphics, and empower companies to deliver compelling visuals that captivate audiences. Design templates save time and effort, enabling rapid content creation and iteration, and facilitating seamless collaboration among teams. They also serve as a critical component of brand management, ensuring consistency in visual identity and messaging across various marketing channels. As companies strive to stay ahead in a competitive landscape, design templates are indispensable tools that foster creativity, streamline workflows, and elevate marketing efforts to achieve remarkable results.

Want to learn more about how Papirfly’s templating technology can save you time, ensure consistency in your marketing, and make your team more efficient? Book a demo today!

What is co-op advertising and why do companies need it?

Co-op advertising is the sharing of the advertising costs between a major brand or manufacturer and its local retail channel partners. The local retailers get the benefit of additional marketing dollars to attract customers to their stores, and the manufacturers get the benefit  of local targeted marketing to increase sales. 

There have to be rules set up for this to be beneficial – manufacturers want marketing to be consistent with the brand corporate identity and marketing philosophy, and therefore will provide the marketing dollars to incentivise the retailers to market ‘on-brand’. The local retailers can target the specific demographic locally for the product and can increase their marketing power with a shared marketing dollars model. 

Usually the manufacturer will outline the potential funding available to a particular retailer and detail a set of rules to follow. The retailer will then get reimbursed at an agreed rate for marketing efforts that follow the rules. 

Local retailers may not have the resources or expertise to develop effective marketing strategies themselves, so the manufacturer will provide access to brand assets and run campaigns from which the local retailer can select and tailor to their needs. These assets will have the blessing of the brand leads, legal departments, and are accessible by retailers across the market at a fraction of the costs that the local retailers would incur doing it themselves. Manufacturers can also incentivise local retailers to target particular marketing strategies or products by increasing the reimbursement rate. 

While the co-op advertising model incentivises retailers to follow the brand rules by submitting for reimbursement of costs, this is often coupled with a compliance activity whereby the marketing activities of the retailer are checked via audits of their websites, social media sites, etc. to see what potential customers will actually experience. 

Why companies need co-op?

• To control brand consistency across all franchises, dealers, and retailers. The financial support is a very strong motivation for individuals, dealers, and stores to follow corporate identity and advertising guidelines.
• The budget each dealer is allocated depends on the volume of cars sold (that’s the logic used by a major car retailer). The more cars sold, the more money is reiumbursed, but only under the condition that the brand guidelines and other rules are followed.
• Thanks to the co-op program and managed audit, there is a guarantee that the money a major car retailer’s centralised marketing function invests into each dealership is being used only for compliant and eligible marketing activities. In cases where the dealer doesn’t spend the money, the unused money is forfeit after a determined time period. 
• To have one centralised place for money distribution, not only for tracking purposes, but also for approval process and auditing.
• The side effect is that brand leads and regional managers can supervise and have an overview of marketing activities realised across hundreds of subjects, which allows them to see the whole market, or individual marketing efforts. The overview also helps for money redistribution.
• The tool comes with statistics, which is useful to brand leads and managers to understand on which kind of activities the dealers are in investing the co-op funding.

How Papirfly is supporting our customers with co-op

Papirfly works with a number of customers on their co-op advertising programs and can support with SaaS platforms for complete brand management.

We can provide the DAM, where advertising assets are held, and the SaaS platform for the presentation and distribution of advertising assets to the retailer network. Retailers are able to quickly gain access to the appropriate brand assets and tailor them using our Create & Activate solution to their own local campaigns while staying on brand. Retailers can download the imagery and creatives and use that as the basis of the local campaign, and even utilise a local ad agency to finalise the ad. This removes the possibility of ads not being on brand, not aligned to the brand corporate identity and, potentially delivering messaging that is not inline with the brand.

We provide a co-op platform, seamlessly linked to the DAM (our Manage & Share solution), that enables all the retailers to access and download the co-op rules, corporate identity guidelines, and brand bulletins. These integrated solutions also provide access to the co-op and compliance platforms.

The co-op platforms that we provide can be configured to your needs, and are built to allow for easy set-up of the necessary workflows to guide the retailers through the co-op processes. 

This platform provides the process for retailers to get assets they have created to be reviewed and submit claims for co-op advertising funds, but the platform is only half the story. Just as important is the need for a team to run your co-op program who can audit that your brand rules are being followed and are compliant.

Papirfly provides the experienced professional services to run the co-op program, with a dedicated team of brand specialists that are proven and reliable.

How a major US client works with Papirfly’s co-op funding model and Professional Services team

For one of our major US automotive clients, we provide the platform that can handle the requirements and volumes of a major brand marketing in the US market. 

We also provide the Professional Services to run those co-op programs for the client:

• We studied the brand philosophy and rules to understand the brand vision
• We established a dedicated team that reviews creatives submitted by the retailers to ensure their brand compliance
• We worked with the retailers to suggest improvements that can be made
• We reviewed the co-op advertising payment claims and determined whether the claim rules have been followed 
• We also provided a compliance review team that will actively review the marketing of the local retailer
• We provide a dedicated support desk to answer retailers questions
• We align with the clients business processes to ensure that the payments to retailers go through the required approval processes of the manufacturer and align with the back-end systems to create a seamless payment process

Using the co-op funding model for other use cases outside of car manufacturers

• Any franchise business with multiple locations, besides automotive industry may also include fast-food restaurants, hotels, gyms, spas, or any other organisation with a franchise model
• Manufacturers can support their retailers to increase in-store sales
• Travel and tourism franchises like hotels, airlines, car rentals, etc. could partner with local attractions, restaurants, events, etc. to promote their destinations and packages
• Education franchises like tutoring centres, language schools, online courses, etc. could partner with local schools, libraries, community centres, etc. to promote their programs and services
• Health and wellness franchises like gyms, spas, clinics, etc. could partner with local doctors, nutritionists, therapists, etc. to promote their facilities and treatments
• It can be used for governmental institutions/organisations to control budget handling. e.g. European Parliament and reimbursement of expenses to members for various activities, trips, food, etc.

Other possibilities and variations on how the co-op funding model can be used:

• The managed service can be tailored to what the customer needs. The audit can vary depending on the media category etc. (e.g. a major car manufacturer offers financial support only for events, but dealer can still enter a marketing activity for CI compliance check to get support/advise on anything he is trying to publish)
• The program can serve for CI compliance check only, but the motivation for dealers to submit creatives for review is higher when supported  with marketing money reimbursement
• The co-op portal is linked directly to ‘My Creatives’”, which means that the brand leads can decide to only support (or offer higher reimbursement) for activities that use official templates that are available for dealers at dealer marketing portal (brand hub/point). The dealer can select a predefined template in brand hub, use it for his marketing activity and at the same time send a request for funding into the co-op portal. 

The benefits of having a Papirfly-run co-op model

• Fixed contracted costs for the service
• Experienced team with strong product knowledge
• A world leading product suite focused on branding and co-op
• Adaptability – with an experienced professional services team we can provide insights when you get challenges and adapt to meet your needs
• Running all ads through the co-op portal guarantees how the money is spent thanks to the compliance audit there is a guarantee that the money is not being spent to promote other brands, for example
• The audit team can control minimum advertising price and check that the advertised product is not being offered/sold below MSRP
• The budget each retailer is allocated depends on the volume of sold products, which ensures return on investment of marketing budgets and ensuring local marketing efforts are given the time and attention they deserve
• Through co-op, the brand leads can offer ‘certified providers’ for certain marketing activities – the logic being to have limited number of authorised agencies that work for the retailers. This is not only for better brand consistency and control, but is also often more cost efficient, e.g. cheaper cost for broadcast when you buy media in huge quantities, centralised creation of the marketing materials which can give you lower costs per ad

Reach every customer with co-op advertising

Want to know more about co-op advertising? With automotive, hospitality, retails and finance among the host of industries with companies thriving from a co-op model, take a look at how brands have successfully adopted this initiative.

Your next step is to take control of brand consistency, master the art of helping others speak directly to your target customers, and build strong relationships with those that sell your branded products and services. The potential to activate your brand in every location you serve, and achieve significant growth, is possible with Papirfly’s platform and support.

Book a demo today, and talk to us about how we can help you with your co-op advertising programme.

The importance of analysis in the digital era

In today’s fast-paced business environment, disruptive technologies and new innovations have become the new normal. These technologies are characterised by their ability to challenge the status quo and, in some cases, significantly alter the way businesses and industries operate – creating new markets and disrupting existing ones.

These changes represent opportunities. In having the ability to quickly and accurately analyse and understand the situation, organisations can stay ahead of the curve by making decisions that capitalise on the moment and give them the competitive edge.

Everything is digital. Now what?

Digitalisation is the process of converting information into a digital format. It has been a core business strategy in companies for years. No wonder, with promises of automation of manual processes, streamlining of tedious workflows and access to real-time data-driven decision making.

In today’s digital world, there exists a reporting system for almost any business activity. The challenge, however, is no longer to convert activities into a digital format. Instead, the challenge is to access and relate data across systems. Identifying the most relevant reporting system and accurately relating its data to your goals and objectives are key activities to capitalise on the opportunity to become a data-driven company.

How can you engage in data-driven decision making?

First, you have to clearly define your goals and objectives. This helps identify the metrics you need to monitor in order to ensure you stay on target. Furthermore, this helps identify areas and specific activities that provide you with the most reliable data.

Let’s take a look at an example:

Say you want to measure how many people attended a conference. The first assumption is to count the amount of tickets sold for that event. This will give you the number, but not how many buyers actually attended the conference. The most accurate data would instead be to measure how many tickets were QR scanned at the entrance. Therefore, the system you want to access is the ticketing system at the entrance door, and the data you want to measure are the number of scanned tickets compared to tickets sold.

Thinking of data in this way means you can speed up the process of finding relevant systems and activities to be used in data-driven decision making.

What are the success factors for data-driven decision making?

Data-driven decision making is the process of using data to inform decisions and business strategy. The quality of the decision can only be as good as the quality of the data. Making sure the data quality is at the highest level becomes a key success factor for any data-driven decision:

• Ensure data is accurate and reliable – data needs to be verified for accuracy and come from error-free records that can be used as a reliable source of information.
• Ensure data is relevant to the decision at hand – clearly defining your goals and objectives can help you identify which decisions you need to make to stay on target, and consequently identify which focus areas, products or user activities need to be measured to provide you with the most relevant data.
• Ensure data is timely and complete – data usually consists of many smaller pieces of data – referred to as data fields – that, only when combined together, contribute to a useful dataset. Therefore, when collecting data fields from an operational log or system, you need to make sure you collect it along with enough supporting data fields. This means that when transferred to a business intelligence tool, it does not lose its context and, consequently, its value in reports and analysis.
• Ensure you have a complete set of data necessary to inform the decision, as well as making sure the data is up-to-date and reflects the current situation.

By ensuring that our customers have the right data to back decisions, track their output, and are able to stay on top of daily activities, we’re giving them the tools to operate with the utmost speed and time to market – and ultimately maintaining their competitive edge and continuous growth.

Papirfly’s Measure & Optimise solution can support you and your team’s performance to reach their goals and objectives. Get in touch today to find out how.

A solid product vision is existential for any company

When I first joined Papirfly in the summer of 2022 I joined an exceptional group of people. Through various mergers and acquisitions we had strategically assembled a dream team with a fantastic group of products. 

With the new larger company only being a few months old – yet with a heritage stretching back more than 20 years – it was the perfect time to create a long term product vision; one which would underpin our growth planning.

There are many traits and attributes that differ between successful companies but one thing that unites those who grow the fastest, offer the best customer experience, and continuously innovate is a strong product vision.

What I looked at when creating a product vision for Papirfly

With industry leading products we had a great starting point. For brand control we had Brand Portal and Brand Hub, both of which will become Point in 2023. Our enterprise-grade asset management products include award-winning DAM tools we’re combining to create Place in the next 12 months. And our best-in-class template creation products – that will come together as Produce in the year ahead – help our customers activate their brand.

Add to that the collaboration, planning, workflow, and approval functionality within the product group (all of which will be relaunched as Plan in the coming months) and the Papirfly product offering has everything marketers need to build, launch, scale, defend, and control their brands.

But we didn’t quite yet have it all within one product suite. Which is why we launched Unification; our major program to unite and unify the best of everything we’ve ever built into one cohesive product suite.

Unification, which started at the end of 2022 and will be launched to the market in May 2023 (be the first to get access), will see us bring all of our products’ strengths together for the first time. Where customers might have only used – and loved – one or two products in the past they’ll be able to access all of them in one enterprise-grade tool. One access, one look and feel, one ecosystem. Further, we’ll be able to add our latest product – deep analytics and reporting capability – to the heart of the joined-up product, launching what will be known as Prove simultaneously.

Completing the vision of having one interoperable product suite – designed to put the greatest brand management tools at our customers’ fingertips – is our integrations bench strength, Plus. A marketplace of connectors, plug-ins, and integrations, designed to extend the power, flexibility, and scalability of Papirfly.

Power. Flexibility. Scalability. These became the pillars of our new product vision. The newly unified Papirfly product suite offers customers the ability to do everything they need to in one place, move simply and swiftly between different functionalities, and access a product offering that is absolutely greater than the sum of its parts.

Deciding on, and believing in, Unification

It was relatively obvious from day one that Unification was the right strategy. Why? Because we had a market-leading product in each of our service areas. We didn’t have glaring gaps, we didn’t have to focus on ‘fixing’ broken products, and we didn’t have significant innovation gaps in the market either. Which meant we knew, very quickly, that our primary task was to bring everything together in one family.

The best automotive brands do this – with the commonalities of platform sharing used to build competitive advantage. The best retail groups do this – with shared services, logistics, and scale all used for leverage and to build the best customer experience. We’re doing something similar and Unification is how we’re doing it.

Creating a product vision that works

One thing worse than having no formalised product vision is – of course – having one that doesn’t work. When I, and the product team, set out to create a vision that worked for all of our products, all of our people, and – most importantly – all of our customers, we did our research thoroughly.

The resulting product vision reflects what our customers need, what our people can build (better than anyone else), and where we sit in the market. We have ensured product-market fit by collaborating with customers (including via our new Customer Council), working hand-in-hand with partners (including via our new Product & Partners group), and partnering with industry tone-setters like Forrester.

The result of this multi-pronged approach is that we have a product vision that anyone at Papirfly can communicate to anyone we work with. Indeed our internal studies show that 99% of Papirfly employees, when surveyed, know exactly where the product team is taking our product.

Aligning external with internal

We have worked hard on communications – which is one of the not-so-secret secrets of successful product development. Rather than doing it in isolation we have communicated, collaborated, and engaged with all of our stakeholders. What product builds affects what sales sells, how customer success delivers customer experience, and how marketing talks to the world. So we’ve made sure everyone has been involved in the process.

One of our key outputs has been the opening up of our product development process. Our product roadmap is public and allows all of our customers to feed in ideas, thoughts, and feedback. Our RoadmapTV channel on papirfly.com brings together all of our product assets transparently and simply – from release notes to webinars, from whitepapers to ‘how to’ videos, and from ‘meet the maker’ content to the latest news on our product suite’s evolutions. And our internal program of product knowledge, education, information, and engagement means that everyone at Papirfly knows everything about our product at Papirfly.

The result is a product vision that directly translates to product innovation and one which builds a customer experience we can be proud of – reflected in statistics like 99% of Papirfly customers saying they would happily recommend us to a friend or colleague.

We’ve only just started but our product vision is guiding us for customer-led growth. Find out more about the future of brand management by booking a demo today.

Integrations bridge the gaps between all marketing operations, enabling all our products to work seamlessly with applications in our customer’s ecosystem. No matter where data is coming from, integrations empowers people to complete tasks with better workflows – removing hacks and workarounds.

The aims for integrations are three fold: 

1. Have an ‘out-of-the-box’ plugin for the most popular tools in include them in our price list e.g. Adobe or MS Office integrations.
2. Create commercial synergies with partner integrations, such as Ciloo (print distributor) and ZetaDisplay (digital signage).
3. Improve customer collaboration with future-proof API to all our services to help them drive their business goals. 

The long-term goal for our integrations is to make Papirfly become the dominant integration enablement player for all our customers.

What is an integration?

An integration is a way of enabling different systems to work seamlessly together. Papirfly has supported many new and existing customers by integrating different systems they need to work together to ensure a seamless workflow and powerful output.

Time to market time savings and quality improvements

How Papirfly helped a customer’s marketing department cut down on time to market and ensure quality in their online product images

Our customer’s marketing department stores all their product images in Papirfly’s DAM product and then uses the platform to distribute product images to resellers around Europe.

Seasonal photoshoots are done three to four times a year. The amount of new product images per shoot can often add up to thousands of images. 

Main areas to address:

• Handling of thousands of images is time consuming
• Ensuring that the data quality is high
• Securing the data transfer
• Sheer amount of data means that transfer and import is labour intense

The solution:

We worked with the customer to automate the import of the images, adding of metadata, and synchronising the data with the master data PIM system.

The result: 

We succeeded in addressing all the customer’s main problem areas by returning a full time employee’s effort of a couple of weeks down to one or two hours for each import. Also importantly, the quality of the import is high, and does not rely on human effort, which has the potential of introducing errors or security risks.

Gathering the requirements

The current customer presented the problem to us and, based on our experience with similar customers and our ability to recognize the sheer amount of work effort that our customer devotes to the problem to be solved, that enabled us to think up a solution that works for the customer.

Often while trying to support a customer’s needs, the solution tends to become over complicated and adds too many layers of technical elements, which we work hard to avoid. In this case we narrowed down the transfer to a basic Excel file (least common denominator).

What did the customer need?

All products due for a photoshoot are listed in the customer’s PIM system. An Excel sheet with product information and all products due for the photoshoot is distributed to the photographer. During the photoshoot the photographer names each photo with the correct unique product number.  When finished, all images are sent to Papirfly and, based on the Excel sheet, a process imports the images and corresponding metadata. This batch import process saves weeks of manual work.

Who was part of the requirement gathering process?

The team consisted of the Marketing Director at the customer (problem holder), our Integrations Product Leader, and the accounting team on the customer side (who also use the solution).

Why is gathering requirements so important in this way?

Often, an overly technical solution is not required, a usable one is. We work with our customer to find a middle ground between extremely technically layered solutions and simple solutions that meet the customer’s needs and are easily used by everyday users. The key feature of a successful integration is meeting users where they are at, with the key to success being that the end user can explain it to co-workers, train other team members, and easily use the solution without extensive technical know-how and training.

How we got a PoC up and running so quickly

What is a PoC?

A proof of concept exists to allow customers to test the solution, provide feedback, and allow Papirfly to iterate on the customer’s needs. In building a “Proof of Concept”, we manually work through the entire project step by step, to ensure that we’re thinking correctly, that each step works separately, and then we can automate the process in the final and full solution.

Why was this PoC so important?

With the majority of SaaS solutions, the idea is to “push the button and something will come out the other end”. In integration development, we are pushing the button every step to make sure each step works and cut out things that aren’t optimal, which enables us to be more cost effective. Think about it like a car journey from point A to point B, everything in between should be clean with as little “stops” along the journey, so that the destination is reached faster and more efficiently.

How will we use this for future integrations/product development?

We’ve set-up a process to enable future integrations and product development, as well as reusing building blocks from other integrations. This makes each and every integration more cost effective and stable for our customers. We’re using tried and true methodology and components.

Working with Papirfly’s integration team

This successful integration cut down on the customer’s costs, ensured a secure manner of transferring and uploading of images, made the quality of the process higher, and cut down on time to market from weeks to a couple of hours. In a web shop world where products should be accessible to customers immediately (as most online shops don’t have to wait for the customer to come into the shop), time to market is a key driver of success.

We help our customers on a daily basis with building a more effective work environment, minimising repetitive tasks, lowering time to market, and eliminating the risk of errors being created. All of these factors will help companies grow and evolve through efficiency gains and improved processes.

We’d love to meet with you to understand your integration needs, book a demo with one of our integration experts!