Printed and Online Catalogs Based on TecDoc Data

User Report by TMD - Leading Global Manufacturer of Brake Pads

The TMD Friction Group is a leading global manufacturer of brake pads for original equipment in the automotive and brake industries. The product portfolio includes disc and drum brake pads for passenger cars and commercial vehicles as well as brake pads for racing and friction materials for industrial and rail applications. The aim of our project was to offer TMD Friction customers an up-to-date and complete vehicle brake catalog available online as a data excerpt for further processing or as a PDF excerpt at www.brakebook.com.

ANTEROS catalog
ANTEROS expert search

Important Data Aggregation

A key challenge was to prepare the product and application data - i.e. the relationship between the product and the vehicles that go with it - in a way that made sense for the different uses. With the non-compacted data of the online catalog, more than 10,000 catalog pages per catalog would result. Since catalogs above a certain spine thickness can no longer be bound easily, the number of pages needed to be no higher than with the previous manually typeset catalogs. The compression of the vehicles was key here.

Automation in 4 Months

The catalog automation project with INCONY took only four months from the concept phase to the creation of six printed catalogs for three different brands. After the concept phase, INCONY imported the TecDoc raw data into the ANTEROS catalog software. At this stage, partially formatted output of the data was already available for quality control. TMD Frictionspecific rules for summarization and print layout were then defined - with variations both from brand to brand and target market. In order to save space and improve reading speed, symbols and text abbreviations needed to be displayed instead of the TecDoc characteristic data written out, as before, which is implemented in ANTEROS through rules during print generation.

Catalogs Created with Little Effort

Subsequent editions of the catalogs are only limited to updating the data. These are exported weekly from TecDoc-DMM or PMD and imported fully automatically into the catalog system by TMD Friction. An up-to-date catalog can thus be produced at any time. In addition to being passed on to customers, regular catalog extracts are also used for internal quality control of the data.

“INCONY impressed us with flexible software, professional product engineering, very high performance, technical competence and excellent service.”

TMD Friction
Daniel Tiemann,
Online & Digital Marketing Manager at TMD Friction

Retailer Catalogs Made Simple

TMD Friction was able to derive an individual catalog for individual retailers with little effort, e.g. with deviating article numbers or layouts. For this purpose, a variation of the printing rules was created. The placement of the dealer logo, specific colors, a modified grid or the display of specific article numbers is possible.

Automated Commercial Vehicle Catalogs

Following the passenger car catalogs, TMD Friction has automated catalogs for commercial vehicles with ANTEROS. In addition to chapters for commercial vehicle manufacturers, buses and axles, a chapter for brake systems is also generated. To this end, the relevant products were grouped by TecDoc plus types. In addition, the special features of the various repair stages for drum brake linings were taken into account. These products are presented with dimensions, parts lists and proportional drawings..

Catalog Excerpts OnDemand

TMD Friction also makes the system used to create the complete catalogs available to selected customers via a web interface. Catalog excerpts with limited functions can be created there with just a few clicks.

Online Seminar: Customized Price Lists and Catalogs at the Touch of a Button

Nowadays, catalogs, price lists and data sheets are of great importance, both in electronic and often in printed form. In addition, new customers expect increasingly customized content. A simple catalog is often no longer sufficient; instead, many customers demand customer group or market-specific print documents as well as new product catalogs. This seminar shows how you can create these print documents 100% automatically.

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Quick Catalog Generation

Measured against the complexity of the data, the time required for catalog generation, including summarization, is extremely low and considerably less than that required for template-based print systems: it takes less than 2 hours to generate the Textar catalog, which contains over 2,000 pages, and a few minutes for catalog excerpts.

Online Catalog with Targeted Search

TMD Friction chose to use ANTEROS.web for its ability to permit much more flexible queries than the usual online catalog systems, which are based on the part number and vehicle searches familiar from TecDoc. The expert search is particularly helpful when it comes to commercial vehicles and in cases where information about the vehicle is incomplete: this allows free combination of properties of the product (e.g. number of rivet holes), the vehicle (e.g. manufacturer, model series, fuel type), the brake system (e.g. manufacturer, type) or the assembly (e.g. drum diameter).

Convince Yourself in a Free Software Demo

Do you want to maintain your product data more efficiently, especially if TecDoc does not cover your entire portfolio? Of course you can import your existing TecDoc data and export it later for TecDoc or other formats!

Would you like print catalogs based on your product and vehicle data at the click of a button, including application pages - as it is common in your industry? Or would you like an online shop with convenient searches by vehicle, KBA number or number plate? Then request your software demo of the ANTEROS Crossmedia Automotive Solution now!

Free Software Demo