Client Case Study

Streamlining Creative Resources with IMS Print on Demand

In addition to managing the merchandising program execution on a national level, one pharmacy retail client’s in-house creative group was responsible for responding to each store’s unique merchandising requests. The volume of these store-specific requests for signage related to Flu Shot availability, walk-in clinic hours, store hours and locations, photo department capabilities and local specials, and other one-off requests severely strained the resources of the internal merchandising team.

Client Situation

To ensure brand-compliant execution at the store level, the client could not leave it up to each retail location to be responsible for their own one-off merchandising and signage requirements, instead each variable store-level creative request was submitted to their own in-house creative group, then sent to IMS to print and ship each item.

Noticing the high volume and associated high costs of one-off merchandising requests, IMS proactively suggested a print-on-demand model that would deliver brand-compliant designs with variable content while off-loading this work from the in-house creative team and allowing direct printing and shipping, consolidated via the IMS supplier network

Outcome

The client’s creative team designed master templates. IMS programmed the live areas of the templates for the insertion of text and logos in a brand-compliant manner for individual stores to populate.

Customized items can now be ordered by store managers via the same merchandising portal as the static print items already existing in warehouse inventory. Completed artwork files are automatically routed to optimal cost printers, then printed and shipped directly to store. The program has grown exponentially due to the efficiencies generated for the the client’s corporate merchandising teams and ease of use by store-level associates.

30

reduction in printed signage and other merchandising costs

6000

creative hours saved in the first year of the program

60

program growth in year 1: from 11 templates and 25 end-users to 500 templates and 15,000 end users

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