You can fully brand and white label Element to make it your own. This is everything from its web URL to colours, fonts and themes. You can also go one step further and create branded versions for each of your customers. You can even give it your own name!

Use Element To

• Set up marketing campaigns
• Manage key dates such as go live dates, end dates, delivery dates etc
• Specify the merchandising products that will be used in the campaigns
• Decide how much needs to be produced
• Get production and distribution pricing
• Decide who is going to produce it

Where would the world be without spreadsheets? We know that a lot of our customers are heavily reliant on spreadsheets to manage the information they need for their promotional campaigns. The problem with this though is that they can be a bit unstructured by nature, eg which columns contain what information, copy-and-pasted information, formulae etc.

Element can be customised for you so that it understands and works side-by-side with the spreadsheets you use in your business or that you receive from customers.

As part of our set up, we use a smart processing engine to customise the system to understand your formats. This means you don’t have to change the way you work; the system adapts to you.

You get the best of both worlds; your colleagues and customers can keep using the spreadsheets they are familiar with, but all the information on them is absorbed into the system in a way that facilitates live reporting, tracking and campaign management.

A key part of any campaign is deciding which store or retail outlet is going to get which merchandise. Element gives you a choice of options: 

• Import the allocations you worked out or that your customer sent you on a spreadsheet
• Specify allocation quantities online based on store formats
• Use detailed store profiling and rules to work out store specific quantities, e.g. allocate to stores of a certain size, or with certain windows, or in an area with a certain demographic, etc.

Whichever way works best for you, Element sets up store specific allocations, which are then used to create picking and distribution lists, courier labels and other store comms. 

Element has a store profiling tool integrated within it that allows you to manage detailed information about your retail estate, for example as a result of a store audit.

You can then use this information to allocate marketing materials accurately between stores, ensuring you are only spending on the stores that really need the merchandise, and that you are keeping wastage to a minimum.

For example, you might be doing a campaign in a certain language to promote products only sold in a certain currency, and only in stores that have a certain size and layout. You can use Element to work out exactly which stores should receive this promotion, and ensure you don’t waste money, consumables and distribution on producing something that some outlets will never use.

Once a campaign has launched, some stores or retail outlets always have a need for additional marketing materials. And sometimes they just need signage, POS or merchandise supplies that aren’t linked to a specific activation but are needed for general display.

Element’s call-off module allows you to publish a catalogue of merchandising products from multiple suppliers, and make the catalogue available to stores, outlets, regional managers or head office users.

You Control

• Who can order from which sections of the catalogue
• When products are available and when they expire
• Which supplier the orders should be sent to
• Product costs
• Maximum order and spend quantities
• Stock levels and back orders
• Which products should be held in stock and which are printed or manufactured on demand
• Which products need approval before they are shipped.

You might also want to give your stores, outlets or field staff access to products in a catalogue that are not held in stock by your suppliers but are manufactured on-demand to a customised spec (ie including the store name, special price, or local marketing message).

Element’s product catalogue understands web to print and manufacture on-demand and has a process for turning a field order into a production campaign.

From the manufacture or printer’s point of view, it also has facilities to batch print enabling you to optimise print costs, and send information direct to common web to print devices such as the HP Indigo.

You can give your stores an easy-to-use system to feedback how they implemented a campaign. Stores can send comments and upload pictures of their implementation and you can gather all the information and summarise into a central report.

Element has neat features which turn a customer brief in the form of a marketing campaign into a set of documents to make packing, dispatch and delivery of collateral as efficient as possible. 

You can use the system to speed up how your pick operations work and create customer-specific documentation, such as delivery notes showing images of products.

Element’s dashboard reporting allows you to set up custom dashboards with different information relevant to individual departments or business units. You can set up dashboards for head office and store personnel for example, showing different information on each.

You input common information about your campaigns, but different people get out of it what they need for their day-to-day job.

Element comes with a secure API called Element Connect that allows you to offer integration services to your customer.

This means that instead of your customer sending you spreadsheets, you can offer to connect their systems with yours, and their system can talk to Element and auto send orders. This is a win-win for you and your customers because it means you get accurate information as you need it, and you can report back to your customer more rapidly.

We know that a lot of customers have their own systems out in the field or in their retail outlets where they prefer to publish information about supplier products. That’s no problem; you can tell your customer they can carry on using these, but they can connect to the API to send the orders through to you.

As a printer you’ll most likely have an ERP in place that controls production planning, job scheduling, impositioning, job ganging etc.

That’s a specialist area so Element doesn’t try to do any of it. Instead, we understand that the information you need to manufacture is actually the information collected during campaign briefing but re-purposed with more technical print specifications added.

So, Element works hand-in-hand with popular print MIS systems to facilitate

• Estimating and online pricing
• Job creation and briefing
• Reporting of job status.