Business Profile: Offline
and online leader in cooperative coupon direct marketing.

Primary Use: Digital Asset Management and Workflow Automation

Engage Product: Engage for Corporations

Benefits:

• Workflow is well-designed and powerful, allowing Val-Pak to quickly
and easily implement campaigns.

• Robust software scales with Val-Pak’s growing needs without requiring
supplemental software or hardware.

• Top-notch, real-time reporting capabilities create efficiencies and
streamline job tracking across multiple project sites.

• World-class, knowledgeable, and professional technical support.

Val-Pak pioneered local cooperative direct mail in 1968, and has been the industry
leader for more than 30 years. Since 1998, as part of its annual Franchise 500
listing, Entrepreneur Magazine has ranked Val-Pak as a leading direct mail franchise
system. With a network of more than 250 field offices in the United States,
Canada, Puerto Rico, and Argentina, the familiar blue Val-Pak envelope is widely
recognized by consumers for its valuable coupons.

Prior to Val-Pak’s implementation of Engage for Corporations, the company’s
advertising process was complicated. Val-Pak targets as few as 10,000 households
or as many as 53 million with any given mailing. The annual production figures
are astronomical: 300,000 layouts, 11 billion coupons, 410 million envelopes
mailed. To call Val-Pak’s production department a high-volume operation is an
understatement. For an operation of this size and complexity, organization and
efficiency are critical ­ and daily workflow and storage problems are almost
inevitable. Because Val-Pak handled more than 2,000 jobs a day, tracking projects
often required full-time attention.

Digital Asset Management and Workflow Automation System

Getting the Val-Pak production cycle under control and outfitted for future
growth required a new approach and the adoption of new technology. Val-Pak needed
a truly responsive and flexible workflow system that would create an efficient
marketing environment, which included:

• Increased data storage, network, and output capacity

• Robust digital workflow and production system

• Ability to reuse and repurpose content

• Better management of design and production processes

• Expansion of distribution mechanism via the Internet

After evaluating several options, Val-Pak chose to install Engage for Corporations.
With its digital archiving and fully configurable data and workflow management
capabilities, Engage for Corporations is able to handle multiple data types
including text, graphics, and images, as well as complete pages.

Engage for Corporations offered Val-Pak unlimited benefits, including:

• Management with time-critical job-status information (an automatic
alert system that informs management when jobs are running behind schedule)

• Efficiencies associated with automation of workflow

• Greater production volume and increased time-to-market

• Reduced time and cost of searching for archived material (graphic designers
can search for, retrieve, and download images in a matter of seconds directly
from their desktops)

• Automatic generation of proofs in paper and/or electronic form and
delivery to designated reviewers, compressing the approval cycle

• Faster, more reliable, and less expensive process for backing up images

• Electronic transmission of coupons to customers via the Internet, reducing
distribution costs.

Engage for Corporations helps Val-Pak with the installation and integration
process by integrating six different interfaces: order entry, change orders,
composition, job tracking, PDF proofing, and pre-press imposition information.
In addition, the solution’s output management features were attractive to Val-Pak
for converting the old hierarchical file structure into a database system. Val-Pak’s
transition to a new production and digital archive system was a gradual process
with data and images being converted on an as-needed basis. With Engage for
Corporations, Val-Pak now has a much more powerful query tool and a critical
link between the order entry system and the production database.

Summary

With deployment of Engage for Corporations, Val-Pak has solved several pressing
business needs.

• Gained control over its enterprise advertising production processes

• Protection and expansion of revenue from productivity gains

• Increased workflow automation, virtually limitless storage capacity
for digital assets, and specific production tools translates into new marketing
opportunities