In an effort to speed up system upload times and deliver richer product information through all customer touch points, Schneider Electric Buildings Business (SEBB) partnered with data management provider Riversand and now sees a 75% reduction in product information upload time.
“For someone who is an omnichannel retailer, if you don’t have a good system to manage your products, you are not using the system to its full benefit,” Brett Hopkins, platform manager for SEBB, said during an interview with Multichannel Merchant. “With a good product management system, you can leverage the data behind it to make it a good experience for your customers.”
As SEBB acquired other companies, it acquired new products and parts cataloged on remote databases across multiple ERP systems. Therefore, it became increasingly difficult to keep up with literature and documentation needs.
Data became inconsistent, attributes were scattered and employees were constantly validating product information. SEBB realized they needed to efficiently manage the quality of product information for its more than 100,000 SKUs.
Meanwhile, SEBB’s iPortal ecommerce platform quickly accounted for 90% of the company’s orders. The success of the portal, which was launched in 2008, created an issue as it was built on a temporary content management system that was cumbersome and to update and maintain. It was taking up to 20 minutes to upload each new part into the system. The ecommerce roadmap called for growing the current portfolio of 15,000 parts to over 80,000 parts.
SEBB also had a problem getting the right information to sales and channel partners. Without aggregating their data into “one single source” SEBB would not be able to roll out future support for their project, engineering and estimating tools.
In 2010, SEBB went through a formal evaluation process of Master Data Management (MDM) providers to ease uploading data into the system, set up an appropriate hierarchy and data model, ensure data quality and the consistent management of data, and publish to iPortal and support and other systems
Hopkins said SEBB chose Riversand based on its professional response to the engagement and their solution’s ability to offer the best technology with most flexibility. Riversand’s MDMCenter would not only manage data for publishing catalogs, but also support syndication to other tools using SEBB.
Hopkins said in an interview that SEBB has a lot of applications that rely on product information. These are ecommerce systems, and tools that allow customers to drill down based on product categories and attributes to get the products they need.
“These are also called product configurators or selection tools,” said Hopkins. “We also have engineers that are out at field locations, which are basically building specifications on a particular building using our products.”
Hopkins said SEBB has a platform called Studio360 that these engineers use, using product information.
“All the product information was being managed in a lot of different systems, so any changes had to be done multiple times in multiple systems,” said Hopkins.
Hopkins said the product information management system was important because you could make those changes in one system to push those changes out to the systems that needed it.
“Make updates, make it more efficient, be more reactive to our customer’s needs,” said Hopkins.