ANWR Schuh is Europe's largest buying group and marketing and information association for shoe retailers. They offer a comprehensive service for their 2,100 shoe retailer members with more than 4,100 store outlets, from purchasing to consulting, training and marketing sup­port. In addition, they operate their own bank. Being part of the largest buying group of this kind, dealers gain signifi­cant advantages in terms of purchasing and marketing and help to support the diversity in the shoe re­tail industry.  

Members utilise a consistent corporate branding and present them­selves as "BestPartner." Apart from store decor and POS materials, the branding includes printed collaterals such as leaflets, business cards, advertisements, etc. Until recently, the dealers would work with leaflets that were provided by their suppliers with dealer imprints. ANWR aims to differentiate its group of dealers from its competitors through intelligent market and brand policies that are supporting the local shoe and sporting goods outlets with innovative solutions.

The idea was to create a marketing platform which would enable the individualisation of printed materials that would reach way beyond existing systems. The BestPartner member should be able to manage and individualise his own printed collaterals. The BestPartners should have access to the entire image database of the existing range of products for inclusion in their collaterals and the copy default copy should be adaptable to the individual needs of the outlets. The BestPartner members do not have a homogenous computer system, thus it would be impossible to have any software installed locally. Also, the BestPartners are geographically distributed throughout Germany and Austria such that centralised training sessions would be impractical.

Reinhard Mewes, Director of Store Business, ANWR Schuh GmbH:

“As each dealer carries his individual range of brands and also purchases some brands individually, we needed a marketing platform which would allow a personalisation of printed materials (leaflets, advertisements, insets to newspapers, customer news, stationary, etc.). Such a personalisation is going far beyond existing systems.

With the deployment of onison's web-top-publishing system, BestPartners are today enabled to design their personalised printed materials quickly and easily within the BestPartner corporate branding guidelines.

All that is needed by the BestPartners is Internet access and Inter­net Explorer to login to the ANWR online ordering system. The BestPartner can choose the leaflet to be individualised from a large number of pre-defined templates. The collaterals are all pre-individualised for the BestPartner. The logo of the Best­Partner is automatically inserted together with the address, and a selection of shoes with recommendations for price and text is also added from the database. The display shows a 1:1 repre­sentation of the actual printed collateral to be fully customisable to their needs.

The BestPartner is able to insert the desired shoes with only two mouse clicks, allowing him to fully personalise his offerings. Each image element that is not defined as fixed by ANWR can be changed with this simple method. As the BestPartner inserts a new shoe, a recommendation with the corresponding price and text is also automatically displayed. These can be individualised by simply typing into Internet Explorer to change the text with­out having to open any text from windows or being limited to fixed text choices. The dealer enters his genuine store descrip­tion and adds an image of the store or the store's manager.

The BestPartners' screens show a true representation of the final printed material at all times. The exceptionally simple and intuitive user interface allows for the final production of his personalised leaflets within just a few minutes and the dealer can instantly preview the result in PDF format. If satisfied with the result, the BestPartner needs only to fill in the print order to send the print- ready document to the print shop.

With the help of the onison Preeon Web Top Publishing System, BestPartners can not only design their inividualised seasonal leaflets, but can also design the semi annual "BestPartner-News", and newspaper advertisements, business cards and sta­tion­ary can also be manged with this system.

onison has a compelling concept: Applications, which are not utilised on a daily basis can only be successful if they mimic processes from familiar daily routines and they have to be so simple that no training is required.

Even the management of the data is stunningly simple for ANWR. As a clear differentiator to other systems, no complicated pro­cesses are necessary for ANWR to add new shoes or logos to the system. The original image is uploaded into the system and associated with the rights for BestPartners. Everything else is managed by the system. For example, there is no need to pro­duce derivatives of the original images for Internet viewing. They are automatically generated as needed. This includes rotating, masking or resizing of images.

This is made possible by a revolutionary development of the Swiss software developer onison (International) AG. With its electronic file management (digital assent management) the company opens new possibilities and unprecedented cost cutting potentials. The Preeon Web Top Publishing system can utilise the common print data from publishing applications such as Quark Xpress and Adobe InDesign. Preeon Web Top Publishing computes the data through the structured document markup language XML and transmits it to the web browser and back to the original data. A new software robot generates the individualised document, inserts the original print-ready data and produces print data for the print shops.

onison develops innovative application services. The systems are so simple that they are utilised by thousands of users without any training. onison's offerings include Preeon and ImageDirector, the leading media asset management system as well as the new Taggon web management system. These sys­tems are built to meet the most complex requirements of global enterprises. At the core of the systems is the ground-breaking WOW-Editor (Write-On-Webpage) technology. It allows the al­ter­ation of contents and images online through the browser, straight through the webpage.