Agility and Customer-centrism: Automation Achievements with Lyreco

Lyreco is a worldwide office supply and workplace service distributor, active in more than 42 countries. With nearly a century of success already behind them, their commitment to modernization has led them to product description automation - and to Xanevo.

We had the chance to sit down with Arne from Lyreco Germany and hear about their journey from manual to automated copywriting. He shared their automation achievements and successes to date, how their business has transformed, and what’s in store for their automation efforts in the future. 

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What do you use Xanevo’s automatic text generation services for and what are your goals?

Arne: Actually, we use the automated text generation to provide an automatic content creation process - to enable a dynamic product portfolio which allows us to react directly to market relevant needs - and at the same time, ensure that our customers get all the necessary information about our products - at the time they need it.

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How did you create your content before you started using automation and what were your biggest challenges?

Arne: That’s actually easy to answer because the process before was nearly 100% manual, which, of course, means it required a lot of human resources and at the same time a lot of product referring expert knowledge. 

So we were less agile in quickly changing our product offerings and also implementing new product types.

And especially if you have a widespread portfolio, so a lot of different products - then content creation becomes an even bigger challenge.

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Can you go into more detail on how working with Xanevo helped you solve those challenges?

Arne: Xanevo brings a lot of expert knowledge in different product categories, which we don’t have all the time from our side.

So Xanevo helps us to implement a new program which automatically generates specific product descriptions which include all the needed customer information - with just one mouse click.

So when we have the data, we can just press one button on our computer, and then we have a perfect product description, which includes all needed information for our customers.

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“…we can just press one button on our computer, and then we have a perfect product description, which includes all needed information for our customers.”

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How much content have you created so far with automation? What are your results?

Arne: So far we have generated about 33,000 product descriptions, and at the same time we have minimized the manual effort in that process.

The software also ensures that we can build comparable but simultaneously unique product descriptions for each product in our portfolio.

As a result, we have even more high quality product descriptions than before and in a way shorter time.

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You mentioned the product descriptions are comparable but simultaneously unique - what does that mean?

Arne: The general structure of the product descriptions is the same, so you can use different attribute values from your products.

But at the same time there are smaller detail variations within the structure which are unique.

So that means even though they’re comparable - so the same general structure - you still get variation. 

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What are you most excited about regarding your new content automation process?

Arne: We are able now to implement a new process which is almost fully automated.

And that will enable us to be more dynamic in our product offering, and we’re even more agile in providing our customers all needed information and reacting to market needs in a very short time.

So we can build a more dynamic offer for our customers in total.

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“We’re even more agile in providing our customers all needed information and reacting to market needs in a very short time.”

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How would you describe the collaboration process? 

Arne: Well, the collaboration in general is really close. And Xanevo offers us widespread experience so they can also support us in all the processes around the content creation process.

So, for example, to import and export the data, the data quality - which are all problems appearing during the project.

Therefore, I’m really happy that Xanevo can also support us in a really good way in all the subjects referring to the content automation project.

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Can you describe the steps you went through in the process to actually automate your content?

Arne: For us it was totally new to work this way; we had never tried to automate our content creation.

So of course we went through a lot of challenges, but we started with sorting our products. We built new clusters and put them all together, and looked at which kinds of products we could put into one cluster to build product descriptions.

That was a big challenge where Xanevo could support us with their experience because they’d already done a lot of projects in different categories of products.

At the same time we improved our product data quality - we also got some clues from Xanevo on how to do this.

We were supported through the whole process, the whole time. That’s really valuable I think.

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Once you got data together, what was the process like after that?

Arne: When we got the data together, we just worked closely with Xanevo, discussing which attributes are important for the descriptions.

Afterwards, Xanevo built sentence structures and implemented them in the software for us.

We basically had to do just the quality review, and that was it.

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Specifically, what has it been like to work with Xanevo? Do you have any additional insights or feedback for us?

Arne: For me personally, it was a great experience. And as a company, it was really wonderful because Xanevo just customized their work to our needs.

So we enjoyed a really individual service, and all our specific needs and requirements were always considered by Xanevo.

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“...we enjoyed a really individual service, and all our specific needs and requirements were always considered by Xanevo.”

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Looking to the future, how much more content do you plan to generate? What are your future content automation goals and what are you looking forward to?

Arne: Well, actually we’re planning to expand the automated content generation to all our products - and generate descriptions for up to 80 thousand products and provide our customers high quality information.

So it will enable us again to become even more customer centered and we are looking forward to the feedback from the customers.

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Are there any last thoughts you’d like to share?

Arne: I’m really glad that we worked together. The way we work together is really nice and very effective.

It makes projects even easier because it’s a really complex topic and a really huge project we’re working on.

It becomes even easier when you have high quality partners you can work with.

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Here at Xanevo, we’re so glad for the opportunity to help Lyreco Germany increase their product content agility - while simultaneously delivering high quality results and transforming their resource needs.

Thank you for sharing your experience with us, Arne!