In this article, we describe our recent implementation that involves OpenText Media Management and OpenText Exstream to deliver a flexible and powerful solution for creating and managing product marketing materials for a manufacturing company.
Brand Consistency
In our digital age, companies use a myriad of tools to quickly and easily create content – marketing materials, product documentation and other textual and visual assets. Although most companies create brand style and usage guidelines to ensure all messaging and brand assets are used consistently, securing and maintaining uniformity is always a challenge. This is especially difficult when a company produces large volumes of content that needs to be constantly kept up to date.
We have seen a lot of cases where companies were distributing documents that were not aligned with each other and with the current corporate look and feel because updating them is a costly and time-consuming effort that companies cannot afford. Sometimes we see documents that had been created before the new brand book was developed and approved or even before the company was acquired by the competitor. Most commonly, though, we see the documents that have partly adopted the corporate style – such as a logo, the header and the footer – but contain inconsistencies in the body of the document, including fonts, lists, colors and alike – the parts that are often copied from older document versions.
Brand Management with OpenText Solutions
OpenText offers great tools for enterprise brand management – OTMM and Exstream.
OTMM, or OpenText Media Management, is an intelligent consolidated media asset repository for marketing, branding and commerce. It helps different departments collaborate in real-time to create unique rich content, allowing them to manage brand value, content marketing and customer experience. The solution also includes workflows to reuse, repurpose, approve, dynamically transform and publish the content to any channel and device. OTMM can be used in both B2B and B2C spaces to create brand standards in one place for all departments of an organization.
OpenText Exstream is a powerful Customer Communication Management (CCM) solution, most commonly used to create template customer correspondence – invoices, statements, notification letters. It is also used to create all other kinds of template documents or labels. The solution is capable of creating highly-personalized high volume mass production of documents that can be delivered anywhere anytime. Currently, it is successfully applied in manufacturing, insurance, financial services, telecommunications, healthcare, public sector, and utilities.
A tandem of OpenText Exstream and OTMM can deliver powerful business solutions to orchestrate data, media, transactions, and channels across organizations. It allows organizations to automate and simplify all document-related processes while maintaining strict adherence to the company’s branding standards.
Challenges in Managing Branded Content: Practical Use Case
As companies expand, they face increasing challenges with managing their branded content. Our client, a growing manufacturing company operating on the US and Canadian markets, turned to N-iX Professional Services for an OpenText solution to streamline the processes of building and managing their product sheets and other marketing materials.
The customer was using images created in disparate formats – jpg, gif, and png, and kept in multiple shared or local storages. Product catalogues and specifications lacked image consistency, which created a lot of management overhead.
Neither did the customer have consistency in document design. Product sheets and other marketing materials from different product groups looked as if they were owned by different companies. The management didn’t know for sure which tools were used to create these documents. No one knew which documents were to be used as templates. Additionally, the company recently went through an acquisition and had to align hundreds of existing documents across subsidiaries.
Proposed Solution with OTMM and Exstream
Our proposed solution based on the tandem of OTMM and Exstream was called to address these challenges. OpenText Exstream would generate the massive amounts of template documents, whereas OpenText Media Management would be used for managing all company’s media assets.
The central part of the integration was implementing the ability to insert dynamic image links into document templates. By ‘dynamic’ we mean that changes to the image in OTMM would be automatically applied to all subsequently generated documents. Depending on the selected document template, the system inserts the correct size and modification of the image on the fly.
Old documents can also be updated in a matter of a few mouse clicks. This eliminates a designer’s nightmare when a company undergoes rebranding or updates the style guide. The solution also offered the options to generate a separate catalogue for a certain product group or compile an assortment of products for a specific customer.
The customer also found it valuable that we were removing the pain of enforcing the current guidelines: all templates and styles were set up centrally for use across all the organization. And, of course, we leveraged OTMM versioning functionality to keep historical versions of images and generated documents.
Integrating OTMM and Exstream: Building the Solution
Firstly, it was agreed that the customer consolidates all new and old images in OTMM, and no other local or shared storages would be used any longer. This was critical to the success of the integration project.
Secondly, we took an inventory of all documents and grouped them into several basic templates. Template variations accounted for the specifics of the subsidiaries and product groups as well as the preferred layout in view of document content.
Thirdly, all textual content was consolidated in the leading application, so it could be used in building documents on the as-needed basis.
Fourthly, we implemented a connector that automatically stores generated PDF documents into the respective OTMM folder. It communicates with OTMM API through HTTP requests:
OpenText Media Management Home Page
Explore more case studies on implementing CCM solutions in various industries.
Benefits of Exstream / OTMM Integration
Both OpenText Exstream and OpenText Media Management have powerful features that allow customers to maximize their lifetime value, even if they are implemented as stand-alone products. But their tight integration can deliver a lot of additional business value:
- Take control of the brand
The solution provides an easy way to create and manage branded media assets. All product sheets share the same templates, giving documents the same look and feel. Document design is easy to manage and update across all product line.
- Personalize customer experience
OpenText Exstream and OpenText Media Management integration enables on-demand creation of highly personalized media-rich content for specific customers.
- Save time and resources
All media content is stored in one centralized repository with a fast and intelligent search engine that allows workers of different non-technical departments to upload, search through and update hundreds of assets. Such approach decreases the time for re-branding and adding new marketing campaigns.
- Decrease time for document rebranding
To rebrand all marketing materials, it is enough to update several document templates, upload a new version of the media asset to the web-portal and re-trigger the document creation process.
Summary
To summarize, OpenText Customer Communication Management solution based on OpenText Exstream and OpenText Media Management can be the key to achieving brand consistency and enforcement that businesses demand today.
If you’d like to know more about OpenText solution that benefits from Exstream and Media Management integration, contact N-iX Professional Services. Our experts have years of experience in integrating OpenText solutions for customers and organizations from various industries.
