CREATON and crossbase - a durable solution

CREATON GmbH, headquartered in Wertingen near Augsburg, is one of the largest German manufacturers of clay roof tiles. The company is the market leader in the plain tile sector and one of the leading manufacturers of pressed roof tiles in Europe. The company employs 800 people in 16 plants at 10 locations.

A customized PIM and cross-media solution was implemented for CREATON on the basis of the crossbase standard software. Articles are created in crossbase in the product structure. The products are then maintained with technical product features, texts and comprehensive product relationships. Images (e.g. product and reference object photos, and company-specific photos) are maintained in the integrated MAM and assigned to the products. Most product information is maintained at item group level, using the inheritance concept.

The country-specific catalog price lists are produced automatically via crossbase with Adobe InDesign. The country variants are controlled via the catalog range. As the layout of the price list tables is very complex and the creation should be fully automated, an individual, release-capable software function was integrated. The positioning of the product photos can be changed within the product tables in InDesign and permanently saved back to the database. The image pages are laid out manually. They are also saved via the bidirectional crossbase InDesign interface for updates and subsequent language changes.

With the API server, image data is used in various online media and sales channels at home and abroad. The API server offers a JSON/REST interface to provide information from the MAM and to stream the data. In addition, the API server is used to synchronize the data with the ERP system.

crossbase provides data for internal systems such as SAP. For this purpose, XML or Excel files and media files are exported at the touch of a button. Product information is also offered for use in MS Word and PowerPoint, and a BIM connection has been implemented together with CADClick. This enables automatic generation and storage of IFC files in crossbase. These can then be provided as usual for the output channels and displayed on the website via API.