Armstrong World Industries approached us in 2021 to help manage their digital catalog and mobile app. The task was to keep these digital platforms updated with the latest product data as it became available, but there were a few challenges. First, updates are in the form of finished data sheet PDFs, which would require the establishment of publishing standards. Second, the decentralization of product data prevented automation in the near term, so the work at hand was manual.

We thoughtfully proposed a monthly update cycle after measuring the frequency of their updates and balancing the workload required for each iteration. This tempo also allows us time to collate, quality check, and publish. That would be a giant leap forward for the company since each update was essentially a complete edition of their commercial ceilings catalog—a collection of hundreds of product lines and nearly a million unique data points—that was previously published every other year.

We designed a publishing workflow that tracks pagination and loops back with the production process to ensure each update integrates seamlessly with the rest of the assembled document. The workflow can also handle delayed publishing, a staple requirement for companies that prepare finished product materials to be confidential until a specified product launch date.

As of late 2023, Armstrong has replicated our publishing workflow to include foreign market product catalogs. While the workflow was identical, most other variables differed: markets had different product offerings, version control was out of sync, and stakeholder differences required a separate (albeit parallel) instance of our workflow to run. We advised how these parallel workflows might run in tandem to maximize efficiency.