MultiMedia Studio safeguards the Airbus brand always with CHILI GraFx Smart Templates

The online Brand portal of Airbus

The struggle - create the production room to maintain key brand guidelines

Airbus has been operating in the aerospace industry for 50 years, pioneering progress in everything from civil aircraft to military aviation, eventually growing into one of the leading names in the design, manufacture and sale of aerospace technology. But with such a vast company and with so many colleagues working on different projects and marketing activities, it’s all too easy for strict brand guidelines to become lost with users accessing different documents for different purposes.

Airbus needed a ‘production room’ of sorts operating on two distinct levels:

1. A virtual design center where users could login and design preset documents
2. A more advanced version called “DIYDocs” to fit into its growing MultiMedia Studio for dedicated product documentation.

And for that it needed an asset-driven software solution that connected a vast grid of data with a browser-based tool anyone could utilize with the right training.

The solution - Smart Templates that empower a brand

For the Airbus graphic studio, CHILI GraFx provided the key ingredient the company was looking for - fully integrated Smart Templates through GraFx Publisher.

Back in 2014, Fabrice Seydi, MultiMedia Studio Leader, and the Airbus’ graphic studio were looking for a solution that would enable them to progress the web-to-print plans: “When we saw that CHILI publish was using HTML5, we knew we had found something that could integrate far better for use in a browser without any other plugin such as JavaScript or Flash. So, we set up a trial with a sandbox to put a Smart Template through its paces. And it didn’t take long for us to realize we had found the right solution!”

Alongside a small team, MultiMedia Studio began implementing CHILI publisher on a small scale within its digital delivery platform, developing the personalization-driven Brand Center for its marketing teams and a unique DIYDocs solution for its MultiMedia Studio.

Utilizing templatization through GraFx Publisher enabled Airbus to truly optimize the user experience on both platforms, implementing all of Airbus’ key branding while creating forms that can be customized and altered on demand.

The graphic design engine enabled the team to develop, test and eventually roll out both solutions in little over a year, providing an agile development window and swift time to market from conception to official launch.

Want to view the whole story? In this video recording, Thomas Julé explains how they successfully integrated GraFx Publisher and created the Airbus Brand Portal in a little over a year.

The results - Safeguarding branding through templatization

A powerful driving factor for the successful partnership between Airbus and CHILI publish has been smoothness of the integration and the support provided through training. “Our relationship with CHILI publish, from initial contact to today’s ongoing support, really makes it stand out from other software partners we’ve worked with. We were given incredibly useful insights into optimization, enabling internal staff and external agencies to maximize the efficiency of our online documentation. Smart Templates have enabled us to leverage large data grids and preserve them with a front-end design experience, decreasing production costs and times throughout the organization.”

Implementing CHILI GraFx as part of the new Brand Center and the MultiMedia Studio tools has enabled Airbus to create a more efficient design experience that empowers its users and creates a cost-effective alternative to previous marketing processes.

**Now users no longer require a designer to create a document as the dynamic, asset-driven templates are already uploaded, ready for adjustments. **

“Previously, some project managers would ask me to work on a new banner, but with our new Brand Center, they now have the training and the confidence to do it themselves. Now they can just change the text in the production room and produce brand-centric collateral themselves. So, we’re seeing user mindsets changing for the better, from project manager to final user. It’s great, because we’re saving time while simultaneously reducing costs.”

The online Brand Portal where Airbus employees can create their own graphics