The Einkaufsgenossenschaft des Schweizer Automobilgewerbes (ESA) generates automated catalogue directly from the data of its SAP system. Tiresome and time-consuming catalogue production in thus a thing of the past for ESA.

Important work instrument
ESA is an important Swiss supplier of auto accessories and delivers more than 30,000 items to approximately 7.000 automobile and truck workshops. Catalogues in German and French are an important work instrument for the workshops, now as before.

CEM: interface between SAP and catalogue
With CEM (Catalog Exchange Management) the whole catalogues as well as the product and customer-specific catalogues are created automatically. As a hinge between the data source (SAP) and the layout, this ensures ESA the quick and reliable conversion of the product and image data into the company-specific catalogue layout.

Because now the SAP system is the sole data source, the data quality could be improved significantly.

Using the catalogue on and offline
In addition to the classic (print) catalogue, the files converted with CEM can be used in other forms. For example, as an online catalogue. Or offline as CD-ROM, on which nearly all functions of the online version are available.

Especially for sales force employees, timeliness of the data was increased significatly with the easy-to-create CD-ROM catalogues.

Conclusion
Catalogues for online and offline appliactions can be created quickly, flexibly, and without time-consuming programming work from SAP databases. The professional consulting ensured that ESA's requirements and the existing EDP solutions were attuned optimally to one another.

The advantages of CEM at a glance:

• SAP as sole data source
• Better data quality for online and offline catalogues 
• Integration into existing maintenance processes for data management
• Low effort required to create catalogues 
• Marginal pre-print costs