Industry: Wholesale Building Materials | Headquarters: Ohio, United States
Challenge: Publishing large, regional dealer price books with product data split across a PIM and an ERP, at up to 100,000 SKUs and images | Solution: Pagination automates price book generation from PIM and ERP data into one InDesign template
The Challenge: A Large Building Materials Price Book from PIM and ERP Data
For a building materials distributor, a price book is one of the hardest documents to keep current. The catalog is large, the data lives in more than one system, and every product carries an image and a set of technical attributes.
Novo faced the pattern that most building materials distributors will recognise:
- Product data and pricing live in different systems. Product content, attributes and image links sit in a PIM; prices and availability come from the ERP. The price book has to bring both together, consistently, on every update. This is where Pagination custom integration fits: it connects the PIM and the ERP to the publishing workflow, so both sources feed every generated edition.
- Scale breaks manual layout. A price book that runs to tens of thousands of SKUs, each with an image, cannot be laid out by hand in InDesign without the effort growing faster than the team can absorb.
- Editions vary by region. The same catalog is published as regional price books, so the products, order and pricing shift from one edition to the next.
- Incomplete data shows up on the page. When a single product is missing an attribute or an image, that gap ends up printed in the book. Catching it before publication, rather than after, is a recurring concern for any large product feed.
The Solution: Automated Price Book Generation from One Dataset
Pagination connects to Novo’s PIM and ERP and generates the price book from that combined data, using one InDesign template rather than a separate file per edition.
- One dataset, one template. Product content, attributes and image links come from the PIM, pricing from the ERP. Pagination merges them and renders the document, so an update to the source data flows into the next generated price book.
- Per-SKU images at scale. Each product image is linked from the company’s cloud image library and placed automatically on the right product, across a catalog of up to 100,000 SKUs and images.
- Multiple layouts and an automatic table of contents. The template handles several product layouts, from complex tabular pages to simpler ones, and builds the table of contents from the content itself, so it never falls out of sync with the pages.
- A scheduled feed. Product selections are driven from the PIM and delivered to Pagination on a nightly schedule, so the price book is generated from current data without anyone rebuilding it by hand.
The Data Problems Behind a Large Price Book
The interesting part is what came after go-live. Getting the layout right is one thing; getting a 100,000-SKU price book to actually print cleanly is another, and most of it comes down to the data.
The most common issue is completeness. When a product is missing an attribute or an image, that gap does not disappear, it shows up as a blank spot on the page. It is the same story with data integrity: when a SKU is in the feed but missing from the finished book, that points straight back to something to fix in the data.
The rest is about holding print quality at scale. Full-page images have to be sized so they are not clipped top and bottom, which means managing a trade-off between vector and raster assets to keep the export size sensible. Tables need the same care: column widths and headers controlled so species and finish labels do not wrap onto a second line, and SKU numbers that stay aligned with their prices all the way down the page.
None of this is unique to Novo. Any distributor publishing a large, image-heavy price book from a PIM and an ERP runs into the same things, which is exactly what building materials catalog automation is built to handle.
See It on Your Own Price Book
Share a recent price book or catalog PDF and a CSV export of your SKU data. A short review shows which parts can be automated and what the first generated edition would look like.
