How optimizing core marketing flows reduced production time by over 60%

The family-owned business started as a local lumberyard in the south of Denmark, but within two generations, Davidsen has grown employ more than 1.100 people and generate a turnover of more than €450 million every year.

The big turning point came when Davidsen acquired competitor, Optimera, and became a national rather than a regional supplier for professional DIY. This change does come with certain challenges surrounding both collaboration and speed.

Before implementing Encodify the production time for a campaign was eight weeks. The approval rounds were still, to a large extent, handled manually, and data was fed into spreadsheets.

When data, documents, and communication is going back and forth through emails, direct messages, and Excel the campaign process is not just cumbersome it's slow, and the accumulated amount of data related to just one campaign quickly becomes overwhelming. But for Davidsen it wasn't just one campaign. As a modern business Davidsen Davidsen's marketing efforts need to cover both online and offline, brick-and-mortar stores and website, print and digital. And they haven't taken this challenge lightly. Davidsen is very serious about the omni channel approach, and are constantly testing new solutions to reach customers at all relevant transaction points.

The Davidsen in-house team of three graphic designers was central to controlling the design process. Yet, three sets of hands were working overtime as the demand for more catalogues and different assets kept rising. They were producing both offline and online versions and sometimes multiple versions, each featuring more than 300 product promotions, in one week.

Davidsen wanted to keep up the speed while not increasing the headcount.

"We wanted to gain more time and be more efficient. New things are constantly being added to the Encodify platform. We are evolving, and so is our need to expand the solution."—Kristina Rudebeck Dahl, Marketing Manager

The challenge of producing the large number of catalogues every week is an issue common to retailers. The process involves creating a lot of content. Editing images to fit specific dimensions, adapting copy, and sending different versions and comments back-and-forth through emails. The approval rounds are bound to make the process even more complicated. At Davidsen, they initially embarked on a process to optimize the core marketing workflows, but the project evolved and as good first-round results poured in, the tenacity of the marketing team led them to expand their goal to involve more teams and more colleagues across the organization, and to change the workflows and daily routines.

However, widening the scope of a solution that would at first be seen merely as an effective marketing tool wasn't a given. According to Kristina Rudebeck Dahl, it was essential that marketing experienced tangible results and improved workflows because marketing was the driver of the transformation. "We constantly ask ourselves: How can we make everyday work more manageable? Sometimes we realize it ourselves. But other times it is someone from category management or from one of our stores who inquires about something." And that is why the Davidsen marketing team pushed to have Encodify rolled out to more departments.

"That’s why we connect all things through Encodify. And this will be crucial as we attempt to secure as much of our organisational data as possible. Data takes up an enormous amount of space, so we need to join our available data"—Kristina Rudebeck Dahl, Marketing Manager

What started as a need to be more effective in producing catalogues evolved into a mission to include more and more departments in the system. Today, Davidsen has 270 employees using the Encodify platform, and Kristina wants to roll out the solution in the shops as well. The single most convincing message was that the solution saved time for everyone working with it.

But according toKristina it's not the only reason.

"We want to go out and inform the shops how it works, how signs and promotions can be produced and planned in a better way. How it saves them time, and how they can serve customers better. If a customer asks whether an item will appear next week or what campaigns are planned, then it will be easy for the shop personnel to find an answer in the Encodify platform"—Kristina Rudebeck Dahl, Marketing Manager

And, if Kristina gets her way, expanding the platform to the shops is not the last stop. Davidsen’s campaigns are automatically linked to their ERP, which eases the process of sharing campaign information with their shops, creating campaign reports for the many suppliers, automating the production of shop signage, and streamlining the need to create ad hoc signs in the shops, but she's also looking to include their suppliers in the system. "We really want our suppliers in the system too. They can enrich products with information and pictures. It'll save time on both ends and make the business run smoother."

Throughout this journay, Davidsen has optimized their campaign production process, and the in-house marketing team chose to outsource production of marketing collateral while still owning the briefs in-house. The briefing process was initially managed in a PIM-based solution, but the setup didn’t provide the support they needed.

"We started with Encodify when we had to look at optimizing our catalogue production. And when we then came to the finish line with the catalogues, we began to look at other areas where we could streamline processes"—Kristina Rudebeck Dahl, Marketing Manager

After a few years, the Encodify platform was rolled out beyond the marketing departmentnd the results in marketing were a big part of what convinced other departments to follow suit:

• Time spent on approval rounds has been reduced by 62.5%
• Automated task assignments has reduced production time by more than 60%
• Time spent managing master data for campaigns has been reduced by up to 75%.