Dealing With Dealer Catalogs Part 6: Slow Down Already
While it might seem like getting a head start on next season's workbooks is a good idea, beginning the process too early can actually work against you, delaying delivery of the final books, increasing errors and fostering bad habits among team members.

Turning raw data into a tool that will work well on sales calls is a complicated process. Boiled down, it looks like this:
1. Data generation (generally by product development)
2. Data transfer (to the folks making the workbooks)
3. Production of drafts (by the workbook team, usually for review by others)

No matter how your process works, everything hinges on step one, data generation. If there's not a complete and accurate data set, you can't make complete and accurate workbooks. However, given the overlap of product development and workbook timelines and the competing demands on product developers, workbook data is seldom supplied in toto or on time. And this is what sets workbook managers up for the self-defeating cycle: knowing that the books will take longer to assemble because of incomplete data, they begin the process earlier. The thinking is twofold:
1. We might as well get started early and get done what we can now because there's going to be a big crunch at the end.
2. If we create a draft that's full of holes, maybe it will motivate product development to help us fill them in.

Reasonable solutions to a frustrating problem. But they're wrong-headed. By starting with incomplete information, you're dramatically increasing the amount of work involved. Tens of hours are associated with the production and review of each draft and the more drafts you create, the more resources you're expending on the project. To make matters worse, repeatedly updating drafts with smaller and smaller amounts of information dramatically lowers productivity.

The real solution is a little counterintuitive. Start later. Don't begin draft production until you have complete data. If this means that you won't have time to produce the workbooks on schedule, it's a sign that your production workflow isn't up to date. Automated production solutions using scripting, plug-ins or dedicated software have become incredibly sophisticated. If you can design it, it can be automated. All you need is good data, exactly what you have at the very last minute. With the faster draft turns that automated production provides, you can afford to wait for good data.

There's an even better solution if you wait for good data. By using a workbook platform like Skubedo, you manage not only the process but the data. With a shared database, you can review and tweak product data across multiple departments before you ever build a draft. Or, because drafts can be produced instantaneously, there's no penalty for creating a draft to "prove" to developers that they owe you additional data. And because the system allows users to create assortment-specific documents, you can reduce the size or quantity of master workbooks and replace some or all with much smaller, account-specific documents.

While the "last minute" approach to workbooks sounds hairy, its actually a much less frustrating and hectic workflow than the "start early" method. All it requires that you have good systems in place for data management and draft production. And the investment in those systems is not limited to better workbooks. With good data and a good system, you can save substantial resources on other product-data related projects from packaging production to information delivery to online retailers.