CASE STUDY: Fr.Ant.Niedermayr GmbH & Co.

KG
Before it’s a weekly flier frenzy in your mailbox, it’s a project produced and managed in Canto Cumulus.

Challenge
You see them in mailboxes everywhere—fliers from grocery stores, hardware
depots and countless other retailers. Ever think about the amount of work that
goes into one of these? Every product on every page of every flier has a photo, Product Edition:
description and price—and they must each be correct. Cumulus Workgroup

Fr.Ant.Niedermayr GmbH & Co. KG of Bavaria designs and prints millions of these Plug-ins and Add-ons Used:
• Web Publisher Pro (Canto)
fliers every week from a production pipeline that’s always in motion. It requires the
timely collaboration of employees, agencies and customers, and because mistakes Assets Managed by Cumulus:
• Managed assets: 400,000+
could be costly, mistakes aren’t an option. • Internal catalogs: 12
Solution • Web catalogs: 3
Niedermayr chose Canto Cumulus because it offers the control the company
Why Cumulus:
needs to manage nearly 500,000 product images—not to mention descriptions
and prices for each. The workflow is now streamlined, more accurate and—even • Easy integration into all steps
of the development pipeline
better—Cumulus links to the ERP and SQL database systems the company uses to
• Secure management of image
generate the XML they import into InDesign for “layout free” flier creation. masters
Results and Benefits • Fast and easy inclusion of
• Cumulus serves as a central portal to all product images, so no matter what’s Web-based customers via
needed, it’s easy to find. Web Publisher Pro
• External ERP data linked to Cumulus ensures both systems are always in sync. • Quick and reliable searching
• Customers can browse photos online and easily choose which they want used. • Connectivity with external
systems
Much more than mail When you think about what goes into the production • Cross-platform
Every week, consumers find a fistful of fliers in their of these mailers, it can be mind numbing:
mailboxes, each offering weekly specials, new prod-
• Stability
• Which products should be included?
uct announcements, coupons and more. • IPTC “write back” support for
• On which page should each product be featured? saving metadata inside files
• Which product photos does the customer want
used?
• Where are the product descriptions and prices?
• How do we know the information is accurate?
Producing a weekly flier for your own company would
be tough enough, but imagine doing scores of fliers
for countless other companies, each with its own
product lines, corporate images, content systems
and, of course, approval authorities.
Then, just when you’ve got them all done, you start
all over again for the following week.

“But the flier says 100% off!”

When you produce printed offers, you know how a
Millions of fliers; thousands of assets; hundreds of custom- simple ‘0’ can be the difference between sweet suc-
ers; one DAM system at the heart of it all—Canto cess and a miserable mess. This is why Niedermayr’s
Cumulus.

Canto, the Canto logo and Cumulus are registered trademarks of Canto. Other company and product names might be trademarks of their respective owners.
GEN/mkCS-Niedermayr/2010.06 Copyright ©2010 Canto GmbH. All rights reserved. www.canto.com Page 1 of 2
CASE STUDY: Fr.Ant.Niedermayr GmbH & Co. KG

Easy “anywhere” access for everyone

Niedermayr’s customers appreciate Cumulus
because it’s easy for them to use. Cumulus frees
them from having to maintain their own in-house
digital asset management systems, and it frees
Niedermayr from having to offer technical sup-
port services, as Mr. Senkbeil explains.
“We didn’t want to become a support center, so it
was very important to us that our customers
understand the system immediately.”
Plus, customers have edit access to their meta-
data in Niedermayr’s Cumulus system, so ease of
use helps ensure data accuracy and integrity,
which everyone involved appreciates.
“You don’t need to be a programmer to set up
Cumulus catalogs—it’s really easy.”

Cumulus Web Publisher Pro offers advanced Internet access to any Cumulus catalog. Updates made to the system are
always instantly available online, so Niedermayr’s customers always see the most recent updates and additions.
head of R&D, Peter Senkbeil, had accuracy in
mind when he chose Cumulus.
“Cumulus reliably provides the right images, and
it does so around the clock, just like it has for us
for more than 10 years.”
But in addition to reliable asset management, Mr.
Senkbeil knew he needed reliable process man-
agement. Given the complexity of Niedermayr’s
business, asset management was useless if the
production process itself was broken.
Cumulus the nucleus
For starters, Niedermayr links each product
image with descriptive data found in an ERP sys-
tem so that the metadata in Cumulus is always
as fresh as the products advertised.
For more information
on how Canto Cumulus
Then comes the customer interaction. Custom- can benefit your
ers can perform their own metadata edits, such
as keyword assignments and selections, and they
organization, contact your
can also use Web browsers to determine which local Canto partner, or
images should be used in future fliers. contact Canto directly.
Seamless system integration is key to
Niedermayr’s workflow success, which is one
In the U.S.
reason Cumulus works so well for them. The ERP
has the master metadata, but an SQL database +1 (415) 495-6545
ultimately generates the XML that’s fed, through
Web Services, to an InDesign plug-in that per-
forms the layout magic. In the E.U.
+49 (0) 30 390 485 0
It’s complex workflow to be sure, but reliable
automation and integration ensures Niedermayr
meets the needs of its customers every week. Everywhere
info@canto.com

About Canto & Cumulus

Canto has been dedicated to helping customers fully utilize their digital assets since 1990. Canto Cumulus is a cross-platform solution that enables companies
to easily organize, find, share and track their ever-increasing numbers of digital files, in any format. Canto’s worldwide network of certified developers offers an
impressive assortment of plug-ins that enhance the Cumulus product line further.
Learn more: www.canto.com

Canto, the Canto logo and Cumulus are registered trademarks of Canto. Other company and product names might be trademarks of their respective owners.
GEN/mkCS-Niedermayr/2010.06 Copyright ©2010 Canto GmbH. All rights reserved. www.canto.com Page 2 of 2