Development and Printing a product catalogue for automotive spare parts company (2012)
Design and and print of the automotive aftermarket product catalogue for a manufacturer of automotive components, both original equipment and spare parts.
The realization was carried out through the "One click catalogue" software, a JAVA software created by Taiprora, which extracts the data relating to the products company database (stored in AS400 database), and automatically generating a single multisection PDF, in definitive format, formatted and ready to be sent to the Printer Company for high quality printing.
Catalogues are generated as an unique PDF, but divided in several chapters, each with its own specific formatting:
- Reference for brand-model-year-engine coupling with the customer's internal product code;
- List of Client articles with photos and internal code, divided by type of product;
- Assembly instructions, with engine diagram and reference drawings;
- etc
This project was developed once a year, every year between 2009 and 2012.
The printing was carried out by the D'Auria Spa printing company. 3 versions of the catalog were produced: cars, commercial vehicles and one for motor and scooters. 30,000 copies were produced for the main catalogue (cars) that consisted of over 1,100 pages.
The huge advantage of this "one-click-cataogue" is that this process generates an already optimized PDF: no additional operations are required by a "human" operator on the file created with printing software, as the file is ready to be printed on large scale.
This allowed our client to be able to update their database (and then the printed catalogue) up to some minutes before to create the final PDF to be printed
The processing through our "One Click Catalgoue" connecting directly on the company servers (via intranet) takes about 5-10 minutes to create the PDF file.
Role in this project
Within the Taiprora development team I had multiple roles in this project: project manager having to interface with the customer for the collection of requests and the realization of documentations and offers, one as an executive interfacing with the final printing company for the implementation methods, times and multiple shipments to the client.
As usual, I also dealt with everything concerning the graphic design of the internal catalog layouts in PDF, their approval by the client and their conversion into java + html + css, in order to allow the Java Software to generate all the sections dynamically, creating the printable and black and white PDF version automatically.
The covers of the catalogs (in color) were provided to us by the client, and created by a communication agency located in Pescara.
About this client
The client is a world leader in the production of power transmission systems (both for first plant and aftermarket), specializing in auto parts such as transmission belts, water pumps and engine parts.