Case Study: How a Retailer Centralized Its Data From 280 Suppliers in One System

Big Bang d.o.o. is the biggest Slovenian provider of audio-video and computer parts with market shares that extend from 30% all the way to 60%. It has a net of 18 conventional stores and online shops, accessible from www.bigbang.si. Since they are dealing with a huge amount of data and various suppliers, they were searching for some kind of solution that would make their data management easier and quicker. Our team, therefore, developed a custom PIM platform based on Pimcore, which ensures quick and efficient collaboration with their suppliers. Needless to say, centralizing the products of different suppliers on a single platform significantly increased the efficiency of the order process.

Business Challenge

Big Bang has to manage around 500 product groups, which is around 70,000 products. This, of course, comes with its burdens. The company was dealing with the following issues:

Scattered product data in more than one place
Unstandardized enrichment process
Limited possibilities of adding and maintaining product data by the suppliers
No data versioning
No automatization
No checkup processes
Data exporting not available (for catalogs, price labels, exports for Facebook, etc.)
Increased workload while dealing with multiple spreadsheets and emails

Pimcore Solution

After initial consultations and workshops with the client, we’ve set up a completely new and customized Pimcore-based portal for their product management – all in less than 6 months.

What does the portal offer?

Quick and efficient data creation and enrichment before the product “hits” the shelves
A direct supplier stock import
Wholesale price lists creation
Automatic feeding of information to the ERP system with all the necessary data
Easy data gathering and catalog creation

The whole system is customized in a way that allows different suppliers to edit the same product. It’s up to the company’s administrator to then select the most appropriate and enriched version they want to publish.

Another welcoming feature is automated processes. These include: pinning products to categories, selecting the correct attribute set based on product groups and daily synchronizations of stock and wholesale prices.

We also programmed an innovative extension for defining rules that allow the user to take different actions. For example, you can select one or multiple attributes (product brand, size, color, cost of the product, etc.) and add one or multiple services to the select group of attributes (eg. home delivery or different types of warranties).

The system now consists of:

around 500 product groups
70,000 products
more than 4,000 wholesale price-lists
280 suppliers
106,000 images

… and a great deal of data more, which is now, figuratively speaking, stored under one roof.

Business Results

This new solution resulted in many benefits for Big Bang, including saved time, increased business productivity, improved product data enrichment process and centralized database of all crucial data. Not having to manually distribute product information and spreadsheets to get updates on product data saved the employees significant time – they were able to use this time to focus on other important business initiatives and increase productivity across the company.

While developing the Pimcore-based portal we came up with more useful features and are currently in the process of adding those in order to further optimize and simplify their processes.