brandforce,
at a glance
What we do brandforce is a web-based automated composition and publishing platform that enables you to produce 'on-brand' communications in minutes.
Our services
Why we do it Adherence to brand standards creates brands with impact, but many organisations struggle to achieve compliance. That's where we come in.
About brandforce
Success stories Hear what clients have to say and learn how we've helped streamline and automate publishing workflows while driving brand consistency.
Case studies
Simple. Efficient. Effective. brandforce automates the design and publishing process
while ensuring the integrity of your brand standards
A secure online workspace brandforce is a secure, centralised online workspace, where you can create customised, design-rich and brand compliant documents on demand using only a web browser. And with a couple of clicks the same source content can be output to multiple formats, the choice is yours.Streamline your publishing production workflowsWhat used to take days and involve a designer or specialist production people now takes minutes and can be done by anyone, and the great thing is, the integrity of your brand is maintained so you're always looking good.The convenient and secure browser-based approach enables you and your colleagues to easily collaborate, review, edit, comment and approve content all in the one place.Harness the power of automated compositionThen, when you're ready to publish, brandforce automatically assembles, formats and typesets hundreds, even thousands of managed elements, including copy, logos, images, graphics, charts and tables into richly designed ‘on-brand’ collateral, at the touch of a button.Production headaches are greatly streamlined as the rich design standards of your brand are programmed into the logic of the smart template process and automatically applied when the document or publication is produced.Eliminate inefficiencies and production bottlenecksOnline proofing capabilities mean you can virtually eliminate the inefficient processes that traditionally form major bottlenecks. And by using fewer resources, you can achieve significant cost savings and a faster turnaround.brandforce, a powerful suite of integrated publishing applications in your browser:
brandforceCatalog:Your secure online image bank, where your most important and valuable images, logos, charts and graphics are centrally stored so they are easy to find, manage, use and distribute.brandforcePublish:Your secure online collaborative workspace designed for longer document production. Colleagues can easily work on the same content file at the same time, which produce and publish ‘on-brand’ communications much more quickly and with greater consistency than ever before, saving you considerable time, money and resources.brandforceFolio:Your secure online workspace for those shorter documents, the ones you want to produce quickly and hassle-free, like flyers, advertisements, DL brochures, posters and even your corporate stationery.

Key features and benefits
Secure shared contentCreate content once, share and leverage it for multiple purposes with greater accuracy, consistency and security.Live, real-time collaborationReal time multi-user collaboration and editing on the same document content at the same time. No confusion about updates or versions.Review management made simpleAll changes tracked, logged and saved, including roll back to all past versions, making review and version management simple and easy.Accurate and consistentNo duplicate review or approval processes overcomes disparate and inconsistent information.
brandforceAdmin:Your administration HQ, where you centrally manage your users and your brand content. Assign user permissions and access, whether employees, brand partners or suppliers, and easily review all your users’ online activity.brandforceDirect:A powerful customised database solution linking different data sources and databases to brandforce to dynamically publish a variety of content in one highly efficient workflow. In many cases, legacy data systems make an efficient publishing a difficult goal to achieve: brandforce helps solve. Speed (time to market)Easy and fast on demand automated
multi-channel publishing reduces errors, production timeframes and costs, creating a competitive edge.Brand consistency guaranteedAutomated multi-channel publishing at the
click of a button means consistent use of brand elements for increased consistency and brand integrity.Reduced costsCentralised online management and real time ‘same content’ collaboration combined with design-driven automated publishing ensures brand consistency while reducing operating costs and improving productivity.
brandforce is suitable for Corporate stationery

Corporate literature
– Corporate profile
– Reports, prospectuses
– Press releases
– Case studies
– Employee profiles
– Invites, certificates, postcards
– Posters, banners
– Training collateral

Sales and marketing literature
– Brochures
– Product sheets
– Tenders
– Flyers
– Promotional collateral
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Your brand is an asset that needs protecting Adhering to brand guidelines requires discipline and vigilance but
maintaining consistency and integrity in a world where technologies
are continually changing is an ongoing challenge.
Firstly, traditional publishing processes are costlyEven though computers are used extensively the processes are still often extremely manual, resource intensive, time consuming and very costly to an organisation. Most publishing is still largely linear and heavily dependent on a sequential file-based process — like Word files distributed across email networks — resulting in limited visibility over both the content and the process.Secondly, accuracy and version control are continual problemsThe constant accuracy and version issues involved in managing large amounts of content prepared by multiple contributors in today’s multi-channel publishing environment is never ending. This is a major problem, and happening every day in your average business environment.Thirdly, managing a consistent brand image is a hit and miss affair No matter how well brand guidelines are prepared and documented, employees, resellers and suppliers still go astray, often diluting or changing what doesn’t appeal to them to use an assortment of incorrect typefaces, colours, images and even old versions of logotypes. And nobody’s immune as companies of all sizes make costly mistakes.These are the kind of problems happening all the timeIn your average business environment this is happening constantly. Everyday, people work on all kinds of brand collateral, they have lengthy discussions over email, pieces of work bounce back and forth across one or multiple organisations, sometimes for weeks before they’re finalised. Often, people are brought into the conversation late in the day. Attachments get lost, inboxes fill up and emails bounce. It’s a major problem, and one that’s time consuming costly and inefficient.That's why we designed and developed brandforceAnd we did so in quite a unique and interesting way. Like enabling a number of people, albeit with different permission-based privileges, to work on the same content file at the same time, because we firmly believe in the efficiencies of ‘one source’ content publishing.A powerful web-based automated composition and publishing solution Or making review management simple, powerful and easy because we’d experienced the unproductive toil of disorganised author’s corrections and or incorrect files being supplied that we built in powerful track changes and version control capabilities making it the rigorous business compliance tool it is today. Every change is automatically logged and tracked, so you can see who has made what change and to what paragraph and when, which explains why we can so easily roll back to any past version in seconds because nothing is ever lost or misplaced.Easy and simple to use, saving you time, money and resources Then there’s our type resizer that dynamically checks point size and leading as variable content is entered and alters specifications on the fly within pre-determined ranges to ensure flexibility while meeting your brand standards.And of course, the backbone of brandforce is our powerful XML composition engines built around Adobe’s InDesign server technology that assembles, formats and auto-builds the hundreds of managed elements, like content, logos, images, graphics, charts and tables into design rich and ‘on-brand’ documents that met your brand guidelines, all at the click of a button.And oh, the fact that you need your content in a variety of formats is fine by us too: you can publish whatever you’re working on to any kind of PDF, HTML, XML format because brandforce takes care of all the conversion and repurposing of your content, in minutes.Put simply, brandforce makes you look good, and it can do it 24 hours a day,
7 days a week.
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  • Case studies
  • Macquarie University
  • Melbourne University
  • netwealth
  • Renault Australia
  • Avenues Education
    • Automation delivers brand consistent communications How Macquarie University uses brandforce to streamline
    complex publishing workflows and drive brand consistency
    The need for a dynamic brand management tool In 2008 Macquarie University launched its new brand and began the daunting task of rolling it out to the wider audience.As Jayne Denshire, Publications Manager, explains, ‘our number one priority was to ensure brand consistency. Achieving a uniform brand image across a large, complex organisation like a university is always challenging because of the diverse needs of people in various departments and faculties who all wish to publish a variety of collateral. This is becoming even more difficult as technological innovation leads to the desire to repurpose the same content to different media. When we first saw brandforce, we realised many of the hurdles we faced could be more easily overcome.’Macquarie partners with brandforce for noticeable resultsFrom an initial trial, where the artwork for Open Day 2009 collateral was produced, brandforce has been increasingly used to publish a range of collateral including course guides, degree information sheets, faculty department brochures, posters, flyers, promotional items and reports. ‘Three things really stood out about brandforce’, explains Jayne. ‘First, the consistency of brand image was obvious on Open Day, and indeed it was the first time we had achieved such a uniform look across all faculties for one of the most important events of the year. Second, the print team from the on-campus print facility was delighted with the quality of the PDF files produced from brandforce as they were 100% error-free every time, streamlining production in a way we had not seen before. And third, the willingness of the brandforce team to work with us and our teams to get it right.’The priority was brand consistency and brandforce delivers‘There is no doubt there’s a great design benefit,’ says Jayne. ‘We have lots of people who are not designers needing to produce work and so we find the design-driven automated publishing approach a real strength as brandforce enables them to quickly and cost effectively produce quite complex and detailed collateral consistently time after time. With brandforce users can focus on getting the content right knowing that the branding side of things will be done for them.‘But the more we work with the team at brandforce, the more we see ways of improving our much more complex and traditional publishing systems as well. For example, we’re exploring the power of using brandforce’s XML publishing workflows and sourcing content directly from some of our content management systems to auto-update and populate brandforce templates every time a new document is opened for editing. ‘This is real-time updating from ‘one source’ of content and the exploratory work we have done with the brandforce team shows enormous promise, and is an area we want to explore more fully across the university.’Putting brandforce to workThrough the adoption of centralised control and automated composition, Macquarie University is achieving real gains including:• streamlined processes that have reduced editing and creation times significantly for a range of different collateral, large and small• increased re-use and repurposing of the same content with easier version control and management• reductions in the number of review cycles, avoiding errors normally associated with traditional manual workflows• central management of master smart templates and images so they are easy to find and easy to update• accurate, brand consistent collateral cost-effectively produced by non-design staff• branding elements controlled and brand integrity maintained• printer receives press-ready files that reproduce without any issues, every time.Usage stats: users 50+, templates 150, documents 750, PDFs produced 7,000+Brandforce applications used: Publish, Catalog, Folio, Admin
    About Macquarie University Located in Sydney, Macquarie University is one of Australia's leading universities with over 37,000 enrolled students and more than 2000 academic and professional staff. The University is ranked among the top three per cent of universities in the world with a reputation that is consistently rising. In the Australian Government’s 2010 Excellence in Research for Australian (ERA) initiative, 80 per cent of research activity at Macquarie was judged to be at world standard or higher. www.mq.edu.au
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    Real-time collaboration shaves weeks of editorial workflows How Melbourne University uses brandforce to drive editorial
    collaboration and streamline design-driven publishing workflows
    The University of Melbourne was one of the first users of brandforce nearly four years ago and today a range of collateral is produced on an ongoing basis including the annual report, corporate profile, Open Day collateral, course guide publications and marketing collateral across various departments and faculties.Putting brandforce’s collaboration capabilities to workThe very first project produced was the annual report and what attracted Jim Rule, Manager, Publishing and Merchandise, and the team from marketing services at Melbourne University to adopt brandforce were the powerful real-time collaborative editing capabilities linked to the system’s powerful automated publishing engines.At nearly 200 hundred pages, the annual report is a pretty big production, and up to 17 people from different departments across the university work on the document for many weeks. ‘When we first discovered brandforce we were labouring under the usual inefficiencies of a traditional publishing workflow using Word files, a designer using InDesign to produce changes and PDF proofs and of course, email for distribution, explains Jim. Author’s corrections were many, simply because they were so many vested parties, and turnaround times for proofs were too slow, often taking a week or more. The whole process was error-prone, time consuming and when viewed objectively, very costly.Big gains and increased workflow efficiencies When brandforce was adopted we were amazed at how efficient real-time online collaboration could be, continues Jim. The bottom line is we ended up shaving weeks off the normal production times as editors and writers became vastly more efficient.Instead of checking separate files and proofs in and out of a system as is the case with most document management systems, brandforce is unique in allowing users to work on the same content file at the same time, achieving a level of real-time collaboration and editing that’s never been possible before.‘For our 17 editors and writers it was godsend’ explains Jim, and what’s even better they could at any time of their choosing, produce a fully designed and laid out PDF proof of the annual report for checking using brandforce’s powerful automated assembly technologies, and this is in minutes instead of the normal turnaround time of days as we were used to.The success of this first project saw brandforce quickly applied to a range of other collateral produced on a collaborative basis, projects like the content rich Course Guides and Open Day Programs. The range of standard and public lecture templates introduced across the faculties has also allowed the many different departments to autonomously produce consistent, ‘on-brand’ flyers, posters, DL leaflets and invitations as and when they need them.For marketing services, brandforce has relieved the design and production team of much of the mundane typesetting-based production work freeing them to focus more on strategic design-related communications.Usage stats: users 114, templates 60+, documents 323, PDFs produced 2,500+Brandforce applications used: Publish, Catalog, Folio, Admin
    About Melbourne University Established in 1853, Melbourne University is one of Australia’s oldest universities and has over 35,000 enrolled students who are supported by over 7,300 academic and professional staff. It consistently ranks among the top universities and is currently placed top in Australia and 36th in the world by the Times Higher Education 2010 rankings, and is increasingly international in outlook and reputation. http://www.unimelb.edu.au/
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    Three brands managed
    easily as one     How netwealth successfully uses brandforce
    to publish complex financial literature
    Located in Melbourne, netwealth provides a wide range of financial services products to investors, and like all financial services companies the need to produce a variety of branded documentation is ever present, ranging from content-heavy publications like Product Disclosure Statements, Financial Services Guides and Retail Product brochures to proposals, contracts, speaker presentation notes and documentation, press releases and even key stationery items.The need to produce branded collateralIn netwealth’s case the need to cost effectively produce consistently branded company collateral is even more pressing as the company also owns two other brands in the sector: Financial Planning Services Australia (FPSA) and Bridgeport Financial Services, and indeed some of the same content is now easily repurposed across all three brands.netwealth turns to brandforceWhat initially attracted Matt Heine, executive director, and his team at netwealth were the obvious cost savings from automating the production of a range of collateral, and the detailed audit trail that more than met the strict compliance regulations for the demanding range of financial publications produced.brandforce first conducted a publishing audit and as Matt explains, ‘this was a crucial and necessary step to understand how brandforce could really assist to streamline our processes. What we publish on an annual basis was objectively assessed and in working with the team at brandforce, we were able to design and build a library of smart templates that meets the majority of what’s required on an ongoing basis, making us pretty well self sufficient.’One source content now available 24/7‘When we saw brandforce it made a great deal of sense for our financial documentation, explains Matt, “The fact that there is only ever one version and all changes are tracked, logged and saved against this one version makes it much easier to achieve the goal of robust compliance. And the impressive thing, with one click we self publish the document according to our brand guidelines in a number of formats: in minutes we have either a low-res, or a high-res proof to the same standards as if we had sent it to a designer, we can produce our web PDFs and we can have the content repurposed into HTML, all at the click of a button.’Three brands, now managed as easily as oneGains using brandforce’s powerful automated composition engines were immediate and noticeable, and within weeks, the Financial Planning Services Australia and Bridgeport Financial Services brands were setup in the system to capitalise on the much more efficient and cost effective online production methods.The user environment is controlled by designated client brand administrators who use brandforceAdmin to manage user permissions, access to master documents and the varying output needs.With a library of centralised master templates, the teams managing the three brands can now quickly create new documents and collateral, repurpose content, share content and self publish a range of financial sales and marketing collateral.Matt believes the partnership with brandforce is a key factor in achieving cost effective multi-channel brand management, something increasingly important in today’s cross-media environment.Usage stats: users 26, templates 86, documents 812, PDFs produced 6,000+Brandforce applications used:
    Publish,
    Catalog,
    Admin
    About netwealth netwealth is an unlisted public company established in 1999 and offers a range of investment products to investors. The company is based in Melbourne and manages and advises on over $4 billion in investment funds. www.netwealth.com.au
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    Consistently professional How Renault Australia automated the production of local area
    marketing collateral across a national dealer network
    Renault is one of the world’s leading automotive brands, and communicating consistent brand messaging is vitally important to ensure brand clarity.Three years ago, Renault Australia adopted brandforce as the production process for the growing range of marketing collateral required by the company’s nationwide dealer network that had to meet the exacting brand standards demanded by Renault France.The need for an efficient workflowThe task of constantly producing a brand consistent range of current marketing collateral for a nationwide dealer network was demanding, time-consuming, error-prone and costly.The first step was to collect and centralise all relevant digital assets in brandforceCatalog. Second was the design and setup of an online range of brandforce smart templates that complied with the company’s stringent corporate identity guidelines, allowing Renault Australia marketing staff and dealers to self-publish advertisements, brochures, pricelists, leaflets, newsletters and stationery.Renault partners with online brand publisherNational Head Office Aftersales marketing staff now easily collaborate online with the National Dealer network to produce an extensive range of brand consistent marketing and advertising collateral, and what used to take days if not weeks to accomplish, is now achieved in a matter of minutes. Consistent, timely, accurate and ‘on brand’.Marketing collateral is produced in minutes instead of daysThe production of Renault Australia’s aftermarket marketing material illustrates how brandforce can make a real difference.Each vehicle model is marketed with a distinct and different colour palette but ensuring that was consistently applied was something of a hit and miss affair. To solve this ongoing headache, the smart templates in brandforce were programmed to automatically populate the appropriate colour space with the model brand colour, according to user selection.Second, detailed information, like item description, part number, comments and pricing, used to describe each accessory is now securely stored and updated using GoogleDocs, and importantly, dynamically linked to brandforce. When an accessory image is selected from brandforce’s image library, the important descriptors located in the GoogleDocs files ‘populate’ the ‘parts table’ on the brochure, negating the need for that information to be manually entered by each dealer, saving considerable time, money and resources.And with passenger and commercial models presently totalling 10, the accessories at any one time run into the many hundreds. Brandforce has made a big difference to streamlining Renault Australia’s local area marketing.Usage stats: users 38, templates 27, PDFs produced 1,000+Brandforce applications used: Publish, Catalog, Folio, Admin
    About Renault Australia Renault has been creating cars for over 100 years and is known for its innovation in automotive design and manufacture.

    In Australia, a comprehensive network of dealers markets and services the Renault brand nationally. Located in major cities and selected provincial centres, these dealers have been selected according to Renault’s exacting corporate requirements to provide first-class service standards and an exemplary first-contact point for all Renault customers.     http://www.renault.com.au
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    Unifying three campuses
    under one identity     How Avenues Education uses technology to make
    a difficult job easy
    Avenues Education is a multi-site school providing specialist educational services to the Alfred Child & Adolescent Mental Health Service (ACAMHS).The problem facing Edwina Richardson, Assistant Principal, and her team at Avenues Education was one that small organisations the world over face daily. Resources to promote the organisation are few, budgets are either minimal or non-existent and yet somehow the message still has to get out there.‘Branding is not a word we education people use much, explains Edwina, but as a specialist provider in child and adolescent mental health I think we consider our image more carefully than others. There’s no doubt we have to work harder to promote the school and to raise our profile in the community, and with three geographically distinct campuses in the network the task of achieving consistent communications is challenging. At least, that was until we were introduced to brandforce.’A brand new image required better managementThe launch of a new umbrella brand that helped unify the three campuses into one integrated entity in early 2010 was the ideal time to introduce a new way to produce consistent brand communications.Avenues Education turns to brandforceAs Edwina explains, ‘our brand consultants, The Ball Group, recommended an online brand management service they had developed called brandforce, and although more than sceptical at first because we thought it would cost too much, the more we understood what it could do for the school, the more we became excited about the potential.The first step was the centralisation of all relevant digital assets, like the logo, images, and illustrations in brandforce’s online image bank.Second, the design and setup of the online range of the school’s newly branded collateral as programmable smart templates, which ensured that all three campuses could self-publish and produce consistent material as and when required.Consistently professional across three campusesEverything from brochures about new and existing student programs to student assessment reports, graduation certificates, even student generated postcards, can easily be customised, updated and produced by teachers and admin staff across all three campuses to a high and professional level that’s ‘on brand’ every time.The great thing, as Edwina continues, is our people don’t need anything but a browser and a good broadband connection. We don’t need to run any special software or purchase fonts for specific campus computers as everything is managed online from within brandforce, which means less cost, training and administration overall.The great thing is the consistency we’re now achieving in our communications, but particularly in our promotional activities: it’s a marvellous advertisement for our professionalism in the community in which we operate.Usage stats: users 17, templates 29, documents 85, PDFs produced 490+Brandforce applications used: Publish, Catalog, Admin
    About Avenues Education Avenues Education is a specialist, multi-site Department of Education and Early Childhood Development (DEECD) P-12 school that provides educational services to the Alfred Child and Youth Mental Health Service (ACYMHS).
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    brandforce delivers the efficiencies of automated composition and layout production for brand and design-driven workflows. Employing a web-based document centric collaboration and publishing solution, brandforce is a powerful suite of integrated applications where users can collaborate, review, edit, comment, approve and auto-publish richly designed brand compliant collateral with one-click publishing to multiple formats from the same source content.
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