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Diplomarbeit 2004 (DA04): Arbeits-Archiv
 
DA Mpi 04/1 - Generate a product catalog from an Abacus ERP System
Studierende: Yves Leu, leuyve
  Daniel Walti, waeltdan

Betreuer: Eduard Mumprecht, mpre

The product catalog is an important marketing tool of a commercial enterprise. Usually such catalogs are designed and edited manually, hence design and typographic quality is quite expensive. Since all product data needed for the catalog is stored in an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system anyway, it should be feasible to generate this catalog automatically.

This study examines possible ways of how to produce a catalog from product data found in the database of the Abacus System.

We analysed a number of catalogs of different branches of trade to find a systematic set of typographical and structural characteristics. This lead us to a useful general layout to represent a product group. This is dependent on how one resolves the trade-offs between clarity of the arrangement, level of detail, promotion effect, product grouping, product-specific display effects, etc.

Product catalogs are usually created with the help of a Desktop Publishing Program (DTP). We examined commonly available DTP software regarding their capabilities to combine layout and actual product data. Some DTP systems are able to retrieve data from a product data base, others require the data to be served in specific formats. We tested our solution approaches on a practical example with data from a real product set. This demonstrates the feasibility to generate a catalog using data from an Abacus ERP system.

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