Breathing New Life into Manufacturing User Guides – and to the Customer’s Process
Opportunity
Today, a business is only as future-proof as its technology. Consider this Atlanta based company that publishes a portfolio of well-established industry guides, each of which has a loyal customer base. In the words of a key employee, the company’s infrastructure was like an aging jalopy held together “with bailing wire and duct tape.”
The diagnosis was hardly an exaggeration. The guides—rich with valuable marketing content such as member profiles, organization and location details—were being compiled from databases so old, they required manual, resource-intensive maintenance. They were in no condition to support the company’s new digital product strategy.
The owners saw great potential in their investment—the printed guides were successful, and their data could be mined to produce ancillary products—but the company’s technology and eCommerce infrastructure was holding it back.
The challenges were clear: To better manage its content, the firm needed to update its technology and process infrastructure; and to sell its digital products, it needed to develop a user-friendly web interface.
ColorArt Solution
The ColorArt team offered a custom, future-proof eCommerce solution built using our technology platform. ColorArt replaced the company’s relational database with an updated one, and swapped its legacy composition engine for a more flexible one. It also redesigned and rebuilt all of the company’s product websites.
By re-engineering the back end of the company’s operations using ColorArt’s technology, ColorArt changed the way the firm collects, stores, produces, and delivers its products. In a few short months, the company caught up on 25 years’ worth of digital transformation.
Results
The company updates its directory data with ease, and can deliver digital versions of its products through its websites. Plus, it now has a scalable platform on which it can deploy new products—for new markets—for years to come. The firm now relies on ColorArt’s technology as a key growth driver. It’s main asset is still the data, but by repurposing it using technology, it has unlocked new value for its users, its advertisers, and itself. The firm is already planning to sell enhanced data products to new and existing channels, and to offer ancillary data services.
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