In-House Development or Outsourced Services?

International wood wholesaler, JAF, worked together with an implementation partner, executed innovative methods and utilized the priint:suite from WERK II to build an award-winning print publishing system. Their driving force was to successfully combine the print and web media worlds and master the transformation to in-house development.

JAF's project to produce multilingual product catalogs began in the fall of 2016 with the selection of a system. Since the timber company had already installed a PIM years earlier, and wanted to use the enriched data from it for print after the online shop went live, the focus was on finding a publishing software that could export the data from the PIM and ERP systems into layouts via interfaces and also update it there.

The goal was to also create an option in which the publications and products could be planned by the publication manager and the layouts generated and checked in advance, without having to resort to the marketing team for this task. Ideally, the graphic designers from the JAF team should receive pages that have already been automatically structured with approved content, which they can then fine-tune and enrich with individual marketing content. It was also important that a logic for data output could be stored in the system – the priint:suite was the obvious choice to meet these requirements.

Automated production of product catalogs at JAF

The selection of the system was followed by user stories, a few workshops with the chosen implementation partner, the provision of sample documents and an equally customer-defined, mile-long mind map with hundreds of nodes and cross-connections.

In the mind map, script logic was written for each of these nodes for a placeholder in the template with references to the corresponding source data in the PIM and ERP interface, the dependencies in the context of the overall system, and the detailed query conditions, as well as the resulting variations for the output in the layout.

The logical construct created already had the desired high degree of flexibility and expandability defined in it. Thanks to these innovative methods, a myriad of the usual templates with 1:1 mappings of the data fields were avoided – everything was as if cast from the same mold.

The implementation partner was on board immediately

In hindsight, given the open-mindedness that the service provider brought to this complex, predefined project, the outsourced services were initially the right and only viable way to get the project off the ground and stay on schedule.

The external team, in collaboration with the software manufacturer, contributed the knowledge and experience necessary to set up the priint:suite and implemented the logic described in the mind map using the system's various programming languages.

The first step had been taken

With each adaptation and extension of the predefined logic, an ever-growing mind map with thousands of nodes and cross-connections was created. Change requests were prioritized with a short description and a sample document adapted according to the logic for the service provider's monthly planning, provided that capacities were still available in the next sprint.

Small and simple changes were often prioritized in favor of larger adjustments, which could not be fully implemented by the next scheduled deployment in the production system. Larger developments were sometimes not implemented at all due to the many small tasks and lack of resources. The system development alone through outsourced services increasingly lost momentum with the growing system.

Autonomy’s potential

The desire to be able to develop directly on the system on the customer side, which was already present at the start of the project, intensified in order to be able to provide the ongoing adjustments to the live operation in a timely and cost-effective manner. Since the implemented logic was written under the leadership of the implementation partner and was very well known, both the implementation partner and the software manufacturer opened the door to this previously rather unusual approach due to the situation and the basis of trust.

After the conclusion of a five-day training course at WERK II in the fall of 2018, following the licensing of the SDK software for a local developer system at JAF, and an updated SLA contract that included the co-development process, the conditions were met to begin in-house development.

However, the priint:suite SDK, with all its components, also brought with it a lot of complexities that had to be learned on the job.

JAF's expertise increased from year to year, and so more and more areas of the system could and can be served in-house with the support of WERK II – from the complete administration of sample documents, workflow setup, template construction, and entity and placeholder setup, to adjustments and extensions in programming and independent deployment in the productive system.

With the help of in-house development, system development has gained and is increasingly gaining momentum again, in addition to saving time and money. The interactive, agile collaboration with the implementation partner has given rise to numerous, mutually beneficial ideas that are incorporated into the functional scope of JAF's print publishing system. These impulses have significantly boosted system development, and new, extensive and interesting projects are constantly emerging that would have fallen by the wayside with outsourced services alone.

One example of this should not go unmentioned. In view of the recurring question of whether print catalogs are still relevant, the export of interactive PDFs with automatically generated cross-references in the document and hyperlinks to the product pages in the online shop that are particularly valuable for business success is certainly one of the most interesting current print projects at JAF. This method optimally combines the quality of a classically set and clearly arranged print layout with the advantages of an online shop.