BAYER Crop Science in Monheim

»Bayer CropScience« creates its product packaging fully automatically with VIVA »Network-Publishing« via the Internet. With this technology the cost of the agencies and graphic designers, who previously created the packaging with »Quark XPress«, »Adobe InDesign« or »Illustrator« is saved.

The company
»Bayer CropScience AG« (BCS) has an annual turnover of around 5.7 bn EUR, making it the leading innovative crop science corporation in the fields of plant protection, pest control products for private use and seed and plant biotechnology world-wide. Bayer CropScience employs around 17,900 men and women in more than 120 countries world-wide.

The situation
The company sells and produces products and their packaging world-wide. Here they work together with a mass of advertising agencies, printers and service providers, who exchange data around the world, and who must be co-ordinated on the basis of corporate standards. Thus the company operates in a decentralised way.

This means that every local office not only has its own ideas as to the creation of packaging materials, but also co-ordinates this with the local service providers. The background to this decentralised production is among other things the fact that in every country there are different legal requirements and standards that have an enormous influence on the creation of packaging. Due to this complex structure with many service providers (suppliers) and many clients in the appropriate countries, it comes to an unmanageable mass of relations which create enormous logistical and technical problems.

The project goal with BAYER
The goal of the joint project was to create a system with which packaging could be created fully automatically. At the same time, the system should fulfil the country requirements for the layout as well as satisfying the minimum legal requirements of the country concerned. Furthermore, the system should obviate the need for advertising agencies. Instead, the system should be operated by employees of the local offices, who have absolutely no typographical or other technical knowledge with regard to the creation of print documents. From this criterion it follows automatically that such a system must be simple to use and offer the user as much ease and comfort of use as possible. The new system should therefore not only save costs but also increase considerably the speed of the packaging production.

The Start
The BAYER head office in Monheim/Rhein near Düsseldorf had been looking in vain for years for a suitable solution. The presentation of the VIVA technology had the initial effect that BAYER saw a way of reaching the goals required without loss of quality. The Projet Managers and employees, initially sceptical, could at first not imagine how VIVA could possibly implement such a complex system and produce the correct printed results.

For this purpose a pilot project was started, in which VIVA proved that the technology was capable of fulfilling all BAYER's, requirements. After successful conclusion of the pilot project, BAYER CropScience decided at the end of 2006 to implement the»VIVA Network Publishing« technology world-wide.