Case Study: Improved Data Management Boosts Customer Satisfaction of a Renowned Consumer Goods Brand

Waterco is one of the leading Australian manufacturers and distributor of swimming pools, spas, aquaculture equipment, and water purification solutions. Established in 1981, Waterco exports its products to over 40 countries.

Business Needs

Waterco was making use of multiple websites. Each one had its own product marketing information which was complex to manage and slow to populate with the same data. Product information was scattered among separate systems.

As a result, outdated data about products was presented to customers and distributors. New products often took longer to appear on all the websites, which weakened marketing team’s effort to present new products to the customers.

Managing multiple CMSes was getting hard. Absence of an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) integration or Product Information Management (PIM) implementation made matters worse.

Pimcore Solution

Pimcore made sure that all the regional websites of Waterco used the same Pimcore instance, having access to the full PIM database, which contains all the marketing data for all company products. The websites now use Foundation 5 framework which is managed by Pimcore’s plugin ‘Template Engine technology’ that uses Areablocks Technology. With ‘Template Engine’ editors can customize the content and layout of each page without the intervention of a developer. Product data and other information are indexed with Solr which provides search functionality. With the new improved system, information about any product can be swiftly presented on any website Waterco owns, simplifying many internal marketing processes. A unique Epicor ecommerce connector plugin (specially developed for this project) synchronizes inventory and other ecommerce data from Epicor ERP for B2B portal to present and back to Epicor for sales team to process as new orders. VEND order management was simplified by developing custom plugin, converting VEND POS inventory orders to Epicor orders.

Pimcore helped Waterco develop multiple web-based applications to simplify and unify relationships between Waterco and its customers or dealers. The B2B portal has been integrated with the Epicor ERP data, while the Web2Print technology is used to generate custom warranty certificates.

Business Results

Pimcore’s PIM implementation improved Waterco’s customer satisfaction considerably. Information on products and services is now kept up to date, and is presented across multiple websites effortlessly. The marketing team can now completely concentrate on marketing, rather than wasting their time on website management.

The B2B portal will definitely lower the utilization of the sales team (once its current testing phase is over). New regional websites are created faster and information on them is easily updated, which is managed by company’s marketing team or regional office.