Personalised, digitally printed training packs for HP's global enterprise sales force
Working with HP's Digital Publishing Solutions division and with London Digital Printing Group, we developed a solution to aggregate personal data from various sources into a unique, printed PDF document for every delegate at Hewlett Packard's annual sales conference.
Printed by London Digital using HP's Indigo presses, and delivered to each member of the sales force at the conference, these were bespoke documents based on each salesperson's individual training needs and assessment scores.
The same system was later used by HP's Asia-Pacific and North American divisions. Over time, it evolved into a system hosted by ReportLab which tracked HP staff as they moved through the sales training process, allowing management to generate reports and analysis.
The preparation of a substantial document stack for print involves concerns in addition to those for online viewing. This project involved approximately 2000 documents with 30-50 pages each, and a tight deadline for printing. Documents need extra space ('bleed') and crop marks in some areas; covers, which were printed separately on different paper, were generated as separate documents in a carefully designed order; and the reports were ordered "for distribution", in groups of four hotels and alphabetically within each. Finally, with variable-length documents but a "multiple of 4" layout, we arranged for useful but non-critical extra content to be included to pad each document out to a desirable length.
