Applebee's CORE

Applebee's came to us at S|O wanting a system that fulfilled a few key needs. Their main pain points when getting various collateral created for their restaurants were avoiding printer lock-in and allowing franchisees to customize items in a way that the corporate headquarters approved of. Our answer was the CORE system. The heart of the system is a collateral customization engine that uses IDML and tagging in InDesign and works as follows:

  1. A designer uploads an IDML file with all of the variations of corporate-approved customization
  2. The franchisee's log in and are able to customize pieces in a web interface (see the last screenshot)
  3. The printer running each piece downloads the customized files as IDML through a companion AIR app and can upload tracking and shipping information for the franchisees

There were also other parts of the app that we built over time, including an area to preview new ads, and an area to download hi-res photography if local ads needed to be created. All of the Kids's Menus and much of the in-restaurant campaign signage is customized and ordered through this app for the 1300 Applebee's locations around the United States.

Roles

  • Interaction Design
  • Interface Design
  • Front-end Development (HTML / CSS / JS)
  • Server admin and setup
Screen after initial log in
Collateral list page
IDML editing interface