Soft-carrier, with a turnover of over 60 million Euro and over 120 employees in Germany, Luxembourg, Austria and Switzerland, is one of the largest distributors in the German-speaking world. For years the company has received many awards from trade journals for its customer service.

The privately-owned organization supplies almost all kinds of office equipment that might be needed in a company: from cleaning materials to consumables, office furniture, right up to complete computer and network technology, you can get it all from softcarrier. Out of the »garage company« founded in 1986, an international and highly modern company has developed in a short space of time, and has consistently rationalized and honed its business processes. Only in this way is it possible to offer excellent prices and a wide range of products.

Soft-carrier has already been using the layout software »VivaPress« for the manual creation of printed material since 1998, especially their annually published catalogues. To aid the work of the employees in Marketing with the creation of catalogue pages, VIVA developed a series of functions which have decidedly simplified the catalogue production.

Over the years VIVA developed tools for soft-carrier with which it was possible to collate the current daily status into a complete catalogue. To do this the VivaPress documents that formed each chapter were placed on a server. Using scripts, the documents were collated together to make a complete catalogue and tables of content and index were created. Finally a corresponding low-res PDF for the Internet was created from the documents. The complete production of such a catalogue on an Apple Macintosh took about six to eight hours.

Soft-carrier is constantly striving to optimize its working processes. When VIVA was asked in 2003 to extend the layout software with table functions, it was suggested that the company switch their production to the new tool VivaIP. The Directors Thomas Veit and Michael Philippi were quickly convinced that even a complex table-editing tool in the layout program »VivaPress« would not offer the company the desired benefits to productivity. In a comparison of the costs of further development and those of installing VivaIP it was completely clear that the new technology is generally better value, and more importantly, more flexible and systematic.

A further speciality of the soft-carrier catalogues is the extensive PDF integration. Here VivaIP offers the possibility of defining selected text as an index entry, table of contents entry or as a link. A Link may be a normal one (e. g. link to a page in a document) or contain a JavaScript. Using such a JavaScript, the user can click on the order number in the PDF document and will be connected automatically to the Internet ordering system of softcarrier. The selected article will also be placed automatically in the shopping basket.

With a similar technique, a navigation bar was designed in the layout for the on-line catalogue, which enables the user to scroll to the next or previous page as well as to jump to the table of contents or index. An additional button »Data sheet«, enables the user to view the product group on a specially created page with high-res pictures and enlarged tables.

Soft-carrier produces by day proofing pages for correction and newly introduced products with VivaIP. Every night up to three catalogues with a combined total of over 2,000 pages and more than 3,800 data sheet pages are created for the Internet.

Thanks to VivaIP, the combined processes were accelerated dramatically. today the company can produce over 5,800 catalogue pages per day, which are daily published in the Internet. This makes an annual average of over 1.2 million PDF documents. In addition, with the integration of the new technology soft-carrier saves over 70% of the time previously involved in catalogue production. The company has with this tool an enormously powerful marketing instrument, with whose help a deciding competitive advantage was reached.