Tesco is the first UK retail group and one of the largest in Europe, with more than 2000 points of sale and 22 million consumers.
CHALLENGE
In November 2005 Tesco decided to launch the Tesco Direct brand with the aim of creating two product catalogues containing 1,000 pages each, plus a series of specific flyers totalling about 3,000 pages per year, followed by an e-commerce website containing the catalogue products plus an extended range of special products for the web.
A total of about 200,000 products. All supported by a single platform, they themselves called an "open minded solution for future publishing", capable of receiving assets and content from any supplier from any partof the world. We were engaged to help them manage the assets in an organised manner according to the rules decided by Tesco, to automatically create catalogues and flyers and fed the e-commerce site in virtually real time with updated content and assets.
THE SOLUTION
The actions taken to deal with these challenges were:
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to define the roles of Project Management for all the parties involved
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to define and agree all the functionalities required
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the creation of the logic diagram of the workflow and the data, that included all the required functionality for the ongoing approval of all the stakeholders and departments involved.
We created a customised system named Tesco Publishing System (TPS) to produce the catalogues and the webflow with differentiated content and approval of more than 100,000 products and 200,000 images to automatically feed the e-commerce site.
The success of the launch of TPS has enabled Tesco to get important savings on the management and production of the paper catalogues and a sharp reduction in the time-to-market for images and web content.
Significantly, the project went so well that Tesco could launch six months early, providing valuable early sales and insight into the planning office model.
MARKET / Industry, Retail, Ecommerce
SOLUTION & SERVICES / eTEAM, Website, Hosting, Data farm, Cloud
