How Somfy is creating its sales literature in the blink of an eye and at the same time optimizing the product data on the PIM

Somfy Systems, Inc., better known as Somfy North America,  is part of Somfy Group, an international group present in almost 60 countries. The Group is the world leader in the automatic operation of house and building doors and windows. Somfy develops solutions for comfort, security, energy savings, and personal autonomy. Somfy is today one of the largest manufacturers and suppliers of controllers and drives for entrance gates, garage doors, blinds, and awnings. They also manufacture other home automation products such as connected home, access control, and security devices.

What was the publishing process before contacting Pagination?

Before knowing Pagination, Somfy created both its catalog and price list by hand. As for the catalog, it relied on an agency that created the document in InDesign format. It was a very long job (several months) and required a lot of precision. The price lists, on the other hand, were created with Excel.

How did Pagination help Somfy?

Pagination helps Somfy by merging 3 different data files exported from their PIM (ContentServ) through its data integration engine. There is also another data file that is hand-managed by their Product Marketing Leader, who enters various information including products that will be on offer. With Pagination, Somfy created two projects: the catalog and the price book.

As for the catalog, Pagination collaborated with a communication agency that was responsible for creating the content of the static pages and the creation of the product layouts. For the price list, Somfy asked us to create an InDesign template that would therefore use the same look and feel as the catalog.

Thanks to our work, Somfy became aware of the status of the data on their PIM and decided to take action to make improvements.

Regarding the development of the catalog project, we created a particular logic to manage the accessories, that is the connection to the parent products (parent/child products). We have also created automatic indexes for chapter separators, even for those chapters that contain static pages.

Somfy is very happy with our work, mainly because our collaboration has allowed them to improve the management of both product data and images.