How to streamline the publishing process by working less – a true story

The company

Gardner Denver is one of the most important industrial providers of flow control technology, compressors, blowers, and vacuum pumps worldwide. It is headquartered in the United States.

The company was founded in 1859 and now has offices in 35 countries and more than 30 manufacturing facilities located in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia/Pacific. Gardner Denver designs, manufactures, and markets flow control technologies for various fields of application, such as industrial manufacturing, transportation, energy, food and beverage, and environmental concerns.

Gardner Denver’s price lists: A fundamental tool that needed to be optimized

As an international industrial provider, Gardner Denver relies on distributors all over the world. In order to keep them updated with their product offers, Gardner Denver provides them with accurate price lists.

These documents are also used internally by sales teams and reps to manage orders. Sven Kopp, Pricing Manager at Gardner Denver, said this about the creation process of their price lists:

“The process was very tedious and time-consuming. The process of copying and pasting data from the data sheet into our documents’ layouts that we provided to the agency required a lot of time and was subject to the typical errors related to any hand-made creation process. Moreover, if we needed to update or modify some information, the indications had to move from one department to another and then be sent to our agency.”

To overcome these issues and speed up the publishing process, Gardner Denver looked for a solution on the web and found Pagination:

“We approached Pagination after a period of creating our price lists manually, with the help of an external agency.”

Ready-to-print, multi-currency and multi-language price lists

Gardner Denver’s price lists must follow its corporate visual identity. They are created for specific countries and markets (featuring different languages/currencies). Kopp. said:

“We create 13 different versions of our price lists. They cover different product groups and brands. Every version is differentiated in one or many dimensions, such as price levels, language, brands and currency. We publish our documents in the five major languages and in three currencies. It all depends on the requirements of our distributors and our local department.”

He was impressed by the Pagination features he could enable. About the design side, he found in Pagination a very professional partner, one that can handle very complex InDesign layouts. Regarding the entire process, he found Pagination’s service to be fast and straightforward.

He commented, in particular, on output files:

“Pagination gives us the chance to create both versions: The ready-to-print version and the web version, which is lighter in terms of images and graphics definition.”

A streamlined publishing process, from SAP to finished documents

The biggest benefit that Gardner Denver found was the optimization of the time spent in the publishing process. It changed from days to seconds, for both the generation of the data file and the pagination process.

Gardner Denver works with the SAP management system. Pagination helped Gardner to create their price lists using a standard SAP export that is fine-tuned and normalized using Qlik. This process creates one large data file that includes all the essential product information.

When it comes to the automatic creation of its price lists, Gardner Denver only has to upload its data into the Pagination Cloud, and then the documents are automatically created in PDF and InDesign format. Kopp told us:

“The automatic process enables us to save a lot of time. The price lists are created ready to be distributed, and all the time used in the old copy-paste activity is saved.”

Another big advantage is due to a change of competences, which led to the saving of money:

“The whole process is now completely managed internally. Product Management owns the technical specs and Material Presentation. Pricing owns the Price levels, and the local departments oversee the language. This enables full control of the management of the price list information and structure. Moreover, entrusting the process to our internal team, instead of an external agency, has allowed us to reduce our costs considerably.”

Kopp finished by saying:

“Pagination benefits can be summed up in four points: full control in the management of the price lists and in their structure, a more fluent workflow between company departments, time savings with the automatic process, and costs savings from taking the process internally.”

Sven Kopp
Pricing Manager at Gardner Denver

With Pagination, Gardner Denver streamlined, internalized, and saved money on the whole creation process.