Delivering more products without tapping more resources
The Consortium is one of the UK’s leading suppliers to education, providing schools with all the supplies and services needed to operate their premises and deliver an engaging curriculum.
With 40,000 products – everything from curriculum resources to furniture products – they deliver exceptional value for every budget and are committed to providing the highest quality service to schools and colleges.
The Consortium has successfully developed its business, necessitating the need for advanced tools to aggregate and author rich product content from an expanding variety of sources.
BACKGROUND:
Before Agility, the marketing and ecommerce teams at The Consortium had used two separate content management systems – one for their printed catalogs; another for importing and exporting data to their web solution.
It was a “catalog-first” approach (each product had to be listed in a catalog before it could be published to the web) that created errors, inconsistencies and inefficiencies, not to mention delays and frustrations for the company’s many web customers.
KEY BENEFITS OF AGILITY:
With Agility, The Consortium’s team can now deliver whole new publications within 30 minutes of brief.
Agility has enabled The Consortium to quickly set up products for the web, so that they can be on sale the minute they arrive in the warehouse.
Agility feeds multiple Magento websites. Agility’s out-of-the box XML export tools provide scheduled updates to each site.
The Consortium is highly successful at driving demand from a wide variety of printed catalogs. Agility has improved efficiencies so much that in their peak season the content team can now produce >5,000 unique pages.
Auto pagination of small publications has also enabled the team to deliver a new publication within 30 minutes from brief.
The Agility Modular Interface (AMI) has enabled The Consortium to extend Agility functionality to more and more departments within the business, empowering new users to author and enrich content.
FUTURE PLANS:
In order to deliver increased value to the business, the team is prepared to use Agility to deliver more publications and more websites without calling on any additional resources.
In late 2014, The Consortium is scheduled to implement Agility’s Syndication Module to enable incremental and realtime updates to multiple websites and e-channels, thereby accelerating time to market.
