Thule builds catalog in less than an hour

Thule is the world leader within Sports Utility Transportation, enabling vehicles to transport equipment safely, easily and in style. Their products include load carriers (rooftop boxes, roof rails, and bike carriers), snow chains, trailers, towing systems, and accessories for motor homes and caravans.

THE CHALLENGE

Make it easier to create product tables

Thule’s rack systems are sold through dealers, and Thule provides a yearly product catalog (called a “Fit Guide”) containing all of the current rack systems. The Fit Guide is data-driven; it’s 160 pages filled with tables that explain the details of each system, such as cars the systems work with, optimal gear a system holds, weight limitations, and other pertinent information. These tables are complicated it took significant manual labor to create them. The challenge was to reduce the amount of time it takes to create the tables.

THE SOLUTION

Automate the production process

Thule’s design for the Fit Guide had several challenges:

Thule’s Fit Guide, like many other automotive catalogs, consists of very wide and very long tables. There can be up to 39 columns (spanning both pages of the catalog spread), and are broken down by brand, make, model, model year, and options.

Running heads need to be updated for each spread, and if a table is longer than a spread “continued” line must be appended to the running head.

Each table contained two kinds of footnotes, and note references were of the many-to-one style (many of the same references pointing to a single note).

The product data used to build the Fit Guide is maintained in a database, and Thule’s IT department exports the data into a text file (essentially a very large Excel document) for their marketing department. After a considerable amount of manual intervention, the raw data is transformed into print format.

Avatar reviewed Thule’s workflow, the Fit Guide design, and the raw data, and provided an automated solution for building the Fit Guide using Xdata, an XTension for QuarkXPress that provides a powerful combination of data parsing and page-building capabilities. Avatar set up an Xdata process that reads the Fit Guide data file and builds the entire document automatically. Xdata pours in the product tables a spread at a time, formatting and adjusting the table content on that spread. It also keeps track of footnotes referenced on that spread and accesses the footnote data file, pulls in the requisite notes, and placing them in a separate set of text boxes across the bottom of the spread.

When one spread is complete (it takes just a few seconds), Avatar’s Xdata process automatically adds a new spread to the document and keeps going. When the end of the data file is reached, all of the page and table headers automatically update to reflect the contents of each spread.

THE RESULTS

Three weeks eliminated from production schedule

Using Avatar’s automation processes, Thule can build their entire fit guide in well under an hour, and eliminated three weeks from the production of their Fit Guide. They are very impressed with this successful implementation of automatic table building, and are currently redesigning other internal workflows (including their website) in order to implement additional ways to automate the production and delivery of product literature. Steve Doviak, Thule’s internet manager, worked closely with Avatar in implementing the automation for the Fit Guide and sees a clear advantage in utilizing Avatar’s expertise:

“Avatar has shown us that investing in new processes can definitely improve the overall workflow. We knew there were problems, but didn’t see different ways of tackling them; Avatar has opened up different options for integrating this type of process in other things that we do. We came at this looking at it one dimensionally, just looking to solve one problem. Now we’re looking at other types of information that could be created on demand that we weren’t previously considering.”