Success Story Lutz-Jesco GmbH Hybrid automation of data workflows for complex InDesign price lists
Price lists faster, leaner, more secure: With a hybrid automation workflow, Lutz-Jesco was able to drastically reduce manual maintenance in InDesign—and now saves weeks of effort while achieving higher data quality.
The close cooperation with Noxum has contributed significantly to making our processes more efficient. In particular, the combination of in-depth technical expertise and a clear understanding of our processes and problems led to a tailor-made solution. With the new solution, we were able to eliminate numerous manual steps and implement price list creation in a much more structured and faster manner. This makes our daily work noticeably easier and frees up time for other tasks.
Initial situation
As an established manufacturer of high-quality components for water treatment, purification, and monitoring, Lutz-Jesco GmbH serves customers worldwide in municipal facilities, industrial plants, and the private sector. A central element of its sales activities are the annual product catalogs and price lists. These comprise up to 300 pages and are produced for over 18 product lines in up to seven languages.
Updating these price lists used to be an extremely resource-intensive process: prices had to be manually extracted from Excel files, checked, and transferred to InDesign by hand. This process tied up valuable internal capacity for several weeks and sometimes also required support from external service providers.
Solution
Noxum developed a specialized workflow that largely replaces manual processing with an intelligent interplay of several InDesign automations. These automations automatically read prices from the InDesign source files, for example, and generate a structured overview for subsequent review
Technically, consistent assignment of templates, stylesheets, headers and footers, and price types (e.g., list price, graduated price) was implemented. Logic for recognizing item numbers and price structures (including quantity structures) was also integrated. After verification, the prices are automatically transferred directly to InDesign without manual entry. In addition, automatically generated CSV files are used for preliminary and follow-up checks in controlling:
Furthermore, Noxum used its many years of expertise in publishing processes to support the targeted optimization of PDFs in terms of data volume and structure, which led to a noticeable improvement in performance during further processing.
Result
The new workflow has drastically reduced the production time for price lists: instead of several weeks, the entire process now takes only a few days. In addition, the amount of work required has been reduced by around 36%. Some individual steps have been eliminated completely, while others have been partially automated. As a result, the annual creation of price lists is not only faster, but also more resource-efficient. The entire process requires significantly less coordination and hardly any external support.
Automated processing and the ability to return data in a structured manner ensure consistently high data quality. Overall, the price list creation process has been made so efficient that marketing, sales, and controlling have experienced a noticeable reduction in workload and have given the process their broad approval.
Lutz Jesco GmbH
Lutz Pumpen GmbH (founded in 1954) and Lutz-Jesco GmbH (founded in 2003) stand for high-quality pump and dosing technology “Made in Germany.” Lutz Pumpen specializes in drum and container pumps as well as complete systems for the safe transfer and filling of liquids for numerous industries. Lutz-Jesco complements this with solutions for water treatment, dosing, and disinfection technology, which are used in drinking water, wastewater, swimming pools, and industry. Together, both companies offer a wide range of technologies for the safe, precise, and efficient handling of liquids.
