Automatic data sheet production with crossbase.office at Ziehl-Abegg AG

Künzelsau, 22/09/2011: Ziehl-Abegg is a quality and technology leader in air, control and drive systems. The German manufacturer's motors and controllers can be found in computer tomography systems and complex lift installations all over the world. As a developer of efficient fan technology, Ziehl-Abegg has built a global customer base over the decades and is continually raising the bar in terms of energy consumption.

To create standardized but market-specific product communication, Ziehl-Abegg opted for the crossbase PIM and crossmedia solution. The main automatically produced media are the printed, multi-lingual main catalogs, including some country-specific versions, the online catalog, and directly accessible product information for the sales team, who at the click of a button can produce product data sheets in any language in response to specific customer enquiries.

Central functions of the solution

Production process for data sheets

Data sheets are generated by the crossbase.office module. First, the required product is selected. Then the user defines the language in which the data sheet is to be created and the headings it should contain. Individual headings may contain different variants, so the product information can be put together very flexibly, in a modular fashion.

The data sheet may also contain accessories, spare parts and measured data (measured performance data for the fan, as well as tables and diagrams). With another click, the data sheet is created in Microsoft Office Open XML format (docx). There is no need for Word to be installed on the client system to generate the document.

Full range of design options

Data sheets are generated on the basis of a predefined Word template, which provides scope for professional layout design through the use of page and table layouts. For example, it is possible to specify where to insert images, tables, item descriptions and product features. The number of available images and text blocks, as well as the text length, can be varied without having to create additional templates. For longer data sheets, the module can also generate an automatic table of contents.