Case Study: Technology Distributor Improves Time To Market for 7 Million Products

Business Needs

The company was facing a series of problems with its management of product information and needed a quick solution. The first issue was that the ordering process was very old-fashioned with most orders received mainly through telephone or fax. With a catalog of over 7 million products, this process led to inefficiency and disorganization with time and productivity lost by manually processing orders. Another issue was that there was a lack of tracking capabilities with the catalog. There was no possibility of tracking returning clients, prices, or gaining insights into the life cycle of products. The third issue was about the cooperation between suppliers and clients, specifically with the ETIM structure. The ETIM structure is a product classification that describes product properties and aims to make sure all suppliers are using consistent, standardized data. With the mostly manual entry of this data, the suppliers often provided the wrong data, which resulted in incomplete product information, incorrect orders, and inefficient business processes.

Business Results

With Pimcore in place, the cooperation between the suppliers and clients has become much more efficient. The overall business processes go much smoother, and customers became highly satisfied.

• More efficient ordering process: shifted from offline to online ordering, which reduced the number of (manual) changes to the bare minimum. This initiative saved significant time for itsme, the suppliers, and the clients.
• A better supplier experience due to the ease of use, time conserved and enhanced data quality within the product lifecycle based on the correctness and completeness of product information.