Védiaud Publicité is one of France’s major outdoor advertising companies, operating more than 20,000 advertising assets and over 40,000 display faces across the entire country.
We sat down with Nicolas Fafin, CIO of Védiaud Publicité, at the company’s offices to talk about how PDF Butler changed the way his team generates documents.
“My role is to connect business operations, data, and technology in order to support the business team and the company’s growth and digital transformation,” Nicolas explains.
The Problem
Before PDF Butler, Védiaud Publicité relied on a very well-known solution to generate its documents. The solution worked, but it came with a growing list of headaches as the business evolved.
The day-to-day reality of maintaining the old system was a constant source of friction for the team. Configurations would break after routine updates, and the team often found themselves having to manually rebuild parts of their setup just to get things working properly again.
Discovering PDF Butler
Nicolas started working with PDF Butler before he even joined Védiaud Publicité. As a Salesforce integrator, he had already implemented the solution for multiple clients.
“Before joining Védiaud Publicité as CIO, I worked as a Salesforce Integrator, where I was recommending and implementing this solution, PDF Butler, for several clients,” he says. “So I already knew the product very well before introducing it internally at Védiaud Publicité.”
That hands-on experience made the decision to bring PDF Butler in-house an easy one once he joined the company.
Why Védiaud Publicité Chose PDF Butler
For Védiaud Publicité, the priorities were clear: speed, flexibility, and ease of administration.
“The main reason we decided to buy PDF Butler is that we needed a solution that was fast, flexible, and easier to administer compared to all of the other solutions on the market,” Nicolas says.
“PDF Butler stood out with its simplicity, responsiveness, and strong integration with Salesforce.”
A Progressive, Business-Driven Rollout
Rather than attempting a single, sweeping implementation, the team rolled out PDF Butler one generation flow at a time, matching each rollout to specific business use cases and sales processes.
“We implemented the solution, PDF Butler, progressively. Generation flow by generation flow. Business needs after business needs. Depending on the business use case and sales process we have,” Nicolas says.
“This approach allowed us to stay agile while adapting documents very precisely to operational needs.”
That same intuitiveness extended to user adoption. According to Nicolas, both technical and business teams were able to get up to speed quickly. “The solution is intuitive,” he says. “And now, at both technical and business levels, teams were able to adopt it naturally.”
How Védiaud Publicité Uses PDF Butler Today
Today, PDF Butler is embedded directly in Védiaud Publicité’s Salesforce CRM, powering both everyday commercial documents and one of the company’s most demanding use cases: city books for its patrimony (real estate asset) activities.
“My team and I use PDF Butler to generate multiple operational and commercial documents directly from Salesforce, our CRM, and we also use it for our patrimony activities to generate a complete city book with panels and visuals and maps, assets, and photos, sometimes producing PDFs of more than 150 pages automatically,” he explains.
Behind that capability is a clear set of goals the team set out to achieve. “The objective was to accelerate document generation, reduce manual work, and improve scalability while maintaining high quality and personalized documents,” he says.
At its core, the mission is about delivering value to the customer. “When we’re using PDF Butler, the main goal is to bring high-quality and relevant information efficiently compiled into books directly to our customers,” he says.
The Biggest Advantage: Mass Volume Generation
When asked what stands out most about PDF Butler, Nicolas points to its ability to handle volume without sacrificing quality.
“In our business, in our job, being able to generate large amounts of documents efficiently is a major operational asset. We also highly value the flexibility of the platform and the ability to send it from e-signature very easily.”
Time Savings
While Nicolas is careful not to overstate the numbers, the cumulative impact on the team’s time is substantial.
“It’s difficult to quantify precisely, but we can only save several minutes per document generation lag for the sales, like for the patrimoine in French,” he says. “And when you multiply that by the number of documents generated every week, every month, the total time saving becomes very significant.”
Advice for Companies Considering PDF Butler
For organizations weighing whether PDF Butler is the right fit, his advice is to start by looking at where document generation is holding the business back.
“Maybe focus on operational efficiency first,” he says. “If document generation is becoming a bottleneck, having a flexible and easy-to-maintain solution makes a difference.”
Special thanks to Nicolas Fafin and the team at Védiaud Publicité for sharing their story.
