Industry: Chemical Manufacturing — Water Treatment | Founded: 1986 | Company Size: 51-200 employees | Headquarters: Camden, New Jersey, United States
Challenge: Hundreds of multi-page product data sheets, across five product families, kept up to date by hand while specifications, certifications, and product variants changed continuously
Solution: A nightly pipeline that reads ResinTech’s Plytix PIM channels, generates print-ready data sheets from five InDesign templates, and syncs the finished PDFs back into Plytix as assets linked to each product
ResinTech has supplied high-quality ion exchange resins, activated carbon, and filtration media to the water treatment industry since 1986, for residential, commercial, and industrial applications. As its product line grew, so did the job of keeping every customer, distributor, and partner supplied with current specifications, performance data, and certifications.
Why Manual Product Data Sheet Updates Stopped Scaling
ResinTech’s product data sheets are working documents. Each one runs several pages and carries technical specifications, application guidelines, performance charts, certification marks, ordering information, and safety data. Specifications get revised, certifications are added, variants come and go — and keeping several hundred multi-page documents aligned with all of that by hand was slow, repetitive, and exposed to the inconsistencies that appear whenever the same value has to be typed twice.
The hardest part of the problem was already solved: the data was governed in a PIM. What was missing was the last mile — turning that data into finished, print-ready documents every day, without anyone touching a layout.
Plytix as the Central Product Data Source
Everything starts and ends in Plytix, ResinTech’s Product Information Management system. Plytix holds the complete product record: technical attributes; certification flags; ordering data and product variants; capacity and pressure-loss graphs stored as assets; and long-form application notes authored directly in the PIM as rich HTML.
For ResinTech, certification flags are critical product attributes that can change outside the normal publishing schedule. When a certification is updated in Plytix, the product data sheet needs to reflect that change quickly, without manual layout work.
Each product family is published as a Plytix channel with its own JSON feed at a public URL, and that feed is the contract between the two systems. What Plytix exports is what gets published. Nobody edits a data sheet — people edit the product in Plytix, and the document follows.
From Pim Record To Print-Ready Data Sheet, Every Day
ResinTech partnered with Pagination to automate the document side of that workflow, using content automation built around the PIM. The loop runs unattended every morning:
| Step | What happens |
|---|---|
| 1. Scheduled retrieval | At 06:00 CET the scheduler reads all five Plytix channels in sequence, downloading each JSON feed with its embedded HTML sections intact |
| 2. Processing and validation | The JSON is transformed into CSV for efficient handling and formatting, and each feed is checked before anything is produced: an empty channel stops that run and triggers an alert, so an incomplete export can never overwrite a good data sheet |
| 3. Content rendering | Application notes arrive from Plytix as HTML and are rendered natively in the page — bulleted lists, bold text, headings, and tables keep their formatting in print |
| 4. Image handling | Product photos, certification marks, and capacity graphs are downloaded from the Plytix asset URLs in the feed and placed automatically |
| 5. Generation | Each product family is paired with its template; document generation produces up to 400 data sheets of 2 to 4 pages in less than an hour |
| 6. Sync back to Plytix | Finished PDFs return to the PIM through the Plytix API |
| 7. Reporting | One consolidated email reports feeds processed, documents created, and assets uploaded, updated, or failed |
Closing The Loop: Finished PDFs Back Inside Plytix
Step 6 is the one that makes the PIM authoritative. Pagination checks whether an asset with that name already exists: if it does, the file content is replaced; if not, a new asset is created. It then looks up the product by SKU, retrieves the product ID, and links document to product by writing the asset into the custom attribute Product Data Sheet (PDS).
The PDF lands back in the PIM attached to the exact product it describes, so attributes, images, and the current data sheet all live on the same record. Since ResinTech’s Plytix data also feeds its website, the sheet published in the PIM is the sheet the market downloads. Template logic reads the structure of that data, not just its values: variants linked to a parent SKU are what generate the Ordering Guide table, so changing the variants in the PIM changes tomorrow’s document.
Five Channels, Five Templates
One channel per product family, one template per channel: a complex product gets the detailed layout, a simple one gets the short form.
| Plytix channel | Products | Template role |
|---|---|---|
| Media | Ion exchange resins, activated carbon, filtration media | Detailed spec layout |
| Systems | CLiR 3000, CLiR 5000, Hydra | Detailed spec layout, configurable products |
| Consumables | AF, CB, and IF filters | Detailed spec layout with ordering guide |
| Filter kits | Filter packs and kits | Short-form layout |
| Lab consumables | Lab filters | Short-form layout |
What The Workflow Absorbed Without Redevelopment
Since go-live in October 2024, catalog changes have been handled through mapping and template work — the kind of change every regulated catalog goes through: a new IAPMO certification added to the feed and shown alongside the other marks, a US Patent number added to the media template, glyph substitutions so technical units render consistently, notifications consolidated into a single morning report.
ResinTech’s setup was built in 2024 as a dedicated API integration. Plytix has since become Pagination’s first native PIM partnership, so the same two-way flow — data out of the PIM, finished documents back in — is now available as a ready-made connector. Where a project needs something different, Pagination also supports custom integrations via API, FTP, and manual runs.
What Changed For The Marketing Team
- Hours became a scheduled run: producing data sheets no longer means assembling documents; the team maintains the product record and the documents follow overnight.
- Documents cannot drift: every sheet is generated from the Plytix record, so correcting a value in the PIM corrects every document that uses it.
- New products cost nothing extra: they enter through the existing channels and get a data sheet the next morning; new attributes, certifications, or regulatory fields are a mapping change, not a redesign.
- One place to look: with generated PDFs synced back as linked assets, marketing, sales, distributors, and the website all pull the same current document from the same record.
Key Takeaways For Teams That Already Have A Pim
ResinTech’s data was already correct in Plytix. Automating the last mile made that correctness visible to every customer, every day, in print-ready form — and kept the PIM, rather than a folder of PDFs, as the place where product truth lives.
Publishing product documentation is a challenging task that can put pressure on even the best marketing teams. You can use Pagination to automatically create beautiful documents in just a few seconds that are always ready for print or digital distribution — and, when your data lives in Plytix, to send them straight back where they belong.
Pagination can assess feasibility in a free consultation, starting from your PIM feed, your InDesign template, and a reference PDF.
