Web to Print for Companies with Multiple Locations and Brands

Three locations, two brands, and 20 field staff: In this constellation, Web to Print relieves your marketing department of daily order coordination. KAOS sets up a closed ordering portal through which your employees can retrieve approved print materials and promotional items themselves. The assortment is only visible to authorized users, so your templates and conditions remain internal.

Without a portal, a reorder often goes through five stages: email inquiry, search for the current print file, quote, approval, and shipping. Somewhere along this path, the brochure from the year before last then slips into the print shop. In a Web to Print shop, however, only the valid version of each item is available for selection.

The difference is most evident with personalized print materials. Each person enters their name, extension, and location for their business cards into an input mask and checks the preview before ordering. Thanks to Web to Print, your marketing department no longer has to initiate a separate order for each new employee. The underlying templates are created by our graphics team in Wangen im Allgäu, which has been supporting many medium-sized clients with catalogs and letterheads for years.

Corporate design templates that your team fills in themselves

A portal is only as good as the templates it contains. To ensure quality, for each article in web-to-print, we define which fields remain open and which are locked. Logo, fonts, color values, and spacing are fixed; only content that actually changes remains editable:

Contact details such as name, function, telephone, and email
Location details for branches, subsidiaries, or dealers
Campaign content such as price, period, or a motif from an approved image selection

This ensures that a poster from the 40th branch looks exactly like one from headquarters. The template handles overly long names or double titles by reducing the font size within fixed limits. The system then generates a print-ready PDF with bleed. This significantly streamlines the data verification process before printing with Web to Print.

Some portals fail at the very foundation because color values for print and screen were never properly defined. Before the first template is created, we close such gaps. Our experience as a corporate identity agency helps with this, as we coordinate CMYK, Pantone, and RGB values together from the outset.

SAP Integration via OCI and cXML for Your Web to Print Software

In larger companies, every order goes through the purchasing system. A Web to Print software that exists as an isolated solution alongside it generates queries and duplicate entries. To ensure orders arrive there directly, we can connect the portal directly to SAP via punch-out upon request.

Via the Open Catalog Interface, or OCI for short, your purchasing department opens the portal from within the SAP system, compiles business cards or catalogs, and transfers the shopping cart back. The shopping cart then becomes a purchase requisition in SAP, which follows your usual approval process. Purchasing platforms such as SAP Ariba or Coupa, on the other hand, usually communicate via cXML, a second common standard that we also integrate.

Do you operate without an ERP connection? Even then, you keep costs under control. We store cost centers, budgets per location, and multi-level approvals in the Web2Print shop. If a branch exceeds its budget, the order automatically goes to the responsible manager. We will clarify whether you operate Web to Print with or without SAP with your IT department in advance.

Designed with us.

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SALOMON FOODWORLD – FOOD INNOVATION

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Munk anniversary brochure 125 years embossing

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MUNK Group – Anniversary Brochure

Advent calendar

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Packaging

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Anomal – White wine / Scheurebe & Sauvignon blanc

Print production and shipping processing

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Swarovski – Print Processing

Which Web-to-Print Solutions are Suitable for Mid-Sized Businesses

The appropriate scope is determined less by company size than by the number of orderers and items. A craft business with two branches requires different functions than a manufacturer supplying 150 specialist dealers with brochures. The following overview shows three typical expansion stages and helps you to classify your needs before comparing offers:

Expansion Stage	Suitable for	Typical Functions
Basic Portal	1 to 3 locations, few orderers	Templates, preview, order history
Portal with Approvals	Branch network or dealers, multiple budgets	Cost centers, budget limits, approval levels
Portal with Purchasing Integration	Central purchasing with SAP or purchasing platform	OCI or cXML, billing per cost center, stock items

All three Web-to-Print solutions are built upon each other. You can start small and add approvals or SAP integration later without recreating templates.

However, if only two people occasionally order business cards, a dedicated portal is rarely worthwhile. A direct print order to us is then the better choice.

Often, a Web-to-Print solution is the first step towards organized print management, which considers print volume, suppliers, and inventory together. Because items are reprinted in small runs as needed, cellar stocks noticeably shrink. Furthermore, after a design change, hardly any boxes of outdated brochures end up in the waste paper.

Short distances between agency, printer, and lettershop in the network

Behind the portal are three companies of the Carbunus Media Group with clearly distributed tasks. We handle templates, item maintenance, and technology. Printing is done at KSW, the Web-to-Print printer in our network, using offset or digital printing, including finishing. Futura Marketing, as a lettershop, handles storage, assembly, and shipping to every branch or trade fair.

A dedicated contact person keeps an eye on all three stations and clarifies queries regarding delivery dates or reprints. If individual projects such as annual reports or image brochures are also pending, we implement these in parallel as high-quality print products.

Would you like to see what Web-to-Print could look like specifically in your company? KAOS will show you an example portal with templates, approvals, and the ordering process in a short online demonstration. Please briefly tell us the number of items and the group of orderers, and we will prepare your offer.

Do you have any questions?

Kurt Schauer

Managing Director