Success Story - NCOI

Challenge

The marketing department is responsible for recruiting students for all brands. They employ radio and TV advertising, and the website and especially brochures play a crucial role.

Course texts are an important instrument to promote the various courses on the website in a clear and appealing manner. Their previous method required all training brochures to be ready before the course texts could be published to the website. As a result, much valuable time was lost. They often used the same content from different back office systems.

When preparing marketing texts for the different brands, this similar content was reused in various channels, both online and offline, by means of copying and pasting. Corrections always had to be made in multiple places in case of a change. This was a very time-consuming, but above all an error-prone process.

Although NCOI has several starting moments per year, many students traditionally look around in April and May for information on following a course. Because of this - and also due to the large number of courses offered by NCOI - there is great pressure on the process, to be able to ship the brochures in April.

Evaluation

That’s why a wish list was drawn up, to improve and simplify the brochure development process:

• Publish flexibly at any time to both online and offline channels.
• Reduce the time to publish new courses.
• More efficient layout and publication processes, by taking advantage of better and less error-prone ways to create content.

All digital and offline (print) content had to be managed in a medium-neutral way, independent of the channel and the brand. NCOI was looking for a platform to enrich its back office content with commercial texts and images, so they could be published to the relevant online and offline channels for the brand in question.

Creating paper brochures is extremely important to bring our education proposition to the person responsible for training within organizations. The brochures are developed specifically for this target group. Drafting and editing all brochures was a very time-consuming process, involving many different departments.

 

Ferry Olie, Manager Business Transformation and Innovation

Implementation / Integration

After a market survey, NCOI decided to develop a PIM (Product Information Management) system in which all course data is managed, like the price, product quality and training title.

The WoodWing Studio (formerly Enterprise) multichannel CMS and publishing workflow solution was selected to enrich the content from the PIM and the planning system. That content is displayed within the WoodWing environment, and enriched with commercial texts and images specific to the brand. The ‘publishing tool’ plans all content elements for the print publications to brochure pages.

The designers perform final processing in the layout, without having to worry about the content anymore. In this way, the layout of the brochures can be prepared with a high degree of predictability and flexibility, with the shortest possible lead times.

Both PIM and CMS feature statuses. If content in the PIM system is set to ‘ready for publication’, the data is prepared for the various digital channels. The CMS systems of the various NCOI brands use a pull mechanism to retrieve this content. Qonqord utilized a ‘content API’ to achieve this.

Results & benefits

• A clear, time-saving workflow for every training program.
• Training brochures are no longer created and published in a lengthy, sequential process. Multiple activities can now take place in parallel, more quickly and automatically.
• The design team receives fully automatically laid-out pages for the different brands.
• PDF training brochures are automatically generated and put in the correct website location for future students.
• New content for all brands can be published to all channels at any time.
• Shorter time-to-market, to get courses at an earlier stage to the attention of the students.