iWay BPA and B2B Suites Help Schawk Improve Brand Point Management

Service Provider Brings Speed, Accuracy, and Consistency to Consumer Packaged Goods Industry

Consumer product manufacturers strive for brand consistency; customers should be able to find their favorite product as easily in Buffalo, New York as they can on a shelf in Bangalore, India. From packaging to marketing, advertising, and merchandising, there are many aspects involved with establishing a brand and making sure products display consistent images and messages. As a leading provider of brand point management services, Schawk Inc. helps its clients strengthen their brands through the delivery of compelling and consistent brand experiences that create greater affinity with consumers.

Schawk recently deployed iWay Service Manager as the central component of an XML-driven framework for receiving, normalizing, and integrating data into the design and manufacturing process for consumer readable packaging text. Schawk depends on iWay Software, a division of Information Builders, to automate internal business processes as well as to simplify B2B exchanges with its clients.

"Our job on behalf of our clients is to keep the brand message consistent," explains Stephen Kaufman, chief technology officer at Schawk. "iWay integration technology makes brand point management easier by ensuring, for example, that ink colors on a press in India are the same as the colors on a press in the U.S."

Keeping ink colors consistent is just one of many challenges that Schawk faces. With more than 500 clients worldwide, Schawk helps some of the world’s largest companies manage, monitor, measure, and protect branded assets – and comply with the requirements of highly regulated industries. Schawk’s clients include retailers such as Safeway grocery stores; pharmaceutical giants like Pfizer and Eli Lilly; and well-known consumer product manufacturers such as General Mills, Proctor and Gamble, and Coca-Cola.

Integrating Internal Applications

Technology consultants from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) helped Schawk implement iWay and spearhead its integration initiatives, leveraging a broad base of expertise with the iWay product set. "PWC has a good relationship with Information Builders, which helped the projects go smoothly," Kaufman says.

Internal business process automation (BPA) challenges centered on integrating legacy information systems, such as FileMaker and Lawson, with new enterprise software, such as PeopleSoft. To meet these challenges, PWC constructed a BPA solution using iWay Service Manager. Schawk uses this technology platform to automate complex workflows involving batch or real-time transactions, enabling fast, secure messaging across the enterprise.

When Schawk previously added a new vendor to its PeopleSoft enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, the vendor information would not be available to field employees for several days. A new vendor was assigned a vendor number, which was manually entered into PeopleSoft, pushed into an intermediary data warehouse, and shared with authorized field personnel. In the new system, iWay monitors the PeopleSoft database and automatically updates other applications as soon as new vendor information is added.

"iWay exchanges data and updates our applications as part of an automated workflow," says Kaufman. "It is aware of the processes taking place so it can trigger an event and update the correct records."

Similarly, rather than having customer service reps manually collect information from Microsoft Word, Excel, and e-mail programs, iWay manages these data streams, converts the information into a common format, and presents cohesive sales and service records to the desktop. "It’s faster and more accurate, which increases our overall efficiency and helps keep Schawk competitive," Kaufman explains.

For these and other BPA projects, iWay helps the development team transform existing applications, databases, and transactions into reusable services. "iWay was an excellent platform on which to start our service-oriented architecture and Web services journey," adds Kaufman.

Making Life Easier for Customers

On the business-to-business (B2B) side, customers commonly update label information such as ingredients, nutritional facts, contact information, consumer relations, and product guarantees. Most of the information doesn’t change very often but it needs to be vetted through all iterations. Schawk uses iWay to "listen" for updates and convert new label information into an industry-standard XML format called IPCXML, which Schawk helped create. IPCXML data can be flowed automatically into electronic artwork. "With iWay managing the data streams, we can push data out to multiple SKUs with the same base information" says Kaufman.

The iWay B2B Suite simplifies the planning, development, execution, and monitoring of these transactions with support for many different IT platforms, protocols, data formats, applications, and industry standards. Kaufman and other corporate officers believe such a flexible and scalable integration environment differentiates Schawk from the competition. "Our investment in iWay gives us a competitive edge," he declares. "We can provide our clients with tools that our competitors don’t have."

One such tool is Schawk’s Media Platform Exchange (mpX). Built using iWay Service Manager, mpX establishes XML data standards that enable clients to make on-the-fly packaging changes that can cascade automatically out to multiple SKUs.

"Our customers are very concerned with their ability to be agile," Kaufman says. "Their brands need to be able to quickly respond to market pressures such as cost reductions and competitive threats. So their ability to make changes on their labels, both from a promotional side and a content side, is very critical.

"When those changes are made, we need to enforce the purity and consistency of the brand. And we also want to help them contain the cost of making changes. We leverage iWay to provide them with that speed to market. At the end of the day, it is that ability to respond dynamically that keeps them competitive."

The mpX system reduces the cost of making changes and enables companies with tight brand management budgets to enforce global consistency. For example, one of Schawk’s customers wanted to create a national promotion for a well-recognized charity that involved changing the labels on several hundred products. After analyzing the cost and logistics of the project, they considered narrowing the scope of the promotion.

"Schawk showed them how our processes coupled with the iWay-based mpX system could enable them to make these changes more quickly and cost effectively," Kaufman says. "Because the incremental costs were reduced, they were able to launch the promotion as they had originally envisioned it."

Using XML standards also streamlines e-commerce processes. For example, when consumers look at a product online, they may want to review product details such as ingredients or materials. Typically, this data would be gathered twice – once for the electronic label and once for the physical one. Now Schawk uses mpX to update both files from a single system.

"These kinds of services solidify our relationships with our clients by making information exchange more efficient," Kaufman notes. "iWay is not only a tactical improvement for us, but also a strategic investment. Considering its impact on our global clients, I’d say the payback is about 18 months for our investment in the iWay tools."

Integration As a Competitive Differentiator

Because Schawk has 48 global locations, the company does a lot of load-level manufacturing to keep scheduling and production as consistent as possible. That requires a close relationship with clients and a lot of back-and-forth communication.

"We are the keepers of the data," Kaufman explains. "When it needs to be moved or transformed in XML workflows, iWay can manage these exchanges."

For example, iWay manages printing specs by pulling data from Schawk’s order entry system and converting it to the XML-based Job Definition Format (JDF) used by many Adobe applications for film, plate, and digital file production. By reducing manual data entry and improving data quality, new workflows can focus on the creative aspects of brand point management rather than micromanaging typefaces and ingredient lists.

In a world of shrinking margins, speed-to-market imperatives, and fragmented marketing channels and messages, Schawk’s clients require brand point management at every stage of a product’s life cycle.

"Brand point management requires broad and deep capabilities in strategy, creativity, and execution," Kaufman concludes. "It also requires collaboration around the globe. iWay supports a technology framework that enables us to meet the requirements of an information-intensive, visually based industry. It is one of the reasons we can affirm ourselves as consultants and technology providers, and not merely as commoditized manufacturers."