Perfectly aligned catalogues and websites!

Published on

2020-05-29 15:46:17

Implementation of a PIM-DAM solution for catalogs and website updates

The company

IVAR is an Italian company that has been producing articles for heating and sanitation since 1985: heating body valves, direct metering modules, heat distribution devices, piping and fittings, substations for thermal power plants, distribution manifolds, radiant panel systems, solar plant components, geothermal and boilers. All MADE IN ITALY. The Italian office is also the heart of the IVAR Group, created with the aim of distributing the products abroad and which today has 11 branches: Australia, Belgium, China, Germany, United Kingdom, Czech Republic, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, United States and Tunisia.

Project summary

IVAR’s marketing staff decided to implement a PIM and DAM solution to manage all the information and assets of their products. The integrated information management platform for the omnichannel publication of content has been proposed. Once all the data has been structured and a reconciliation has been made between the information and the digital assets, it has been possible to proceed with the omni-channel publication of the contents, towards the paper catalogue and the website, completely redone.

Currently thanks to GMDE, IVAR is able to produce the International catalogue, the Italian catalogue, the specific catalogues and the product brochures, and to keep constantly updated also the website in 5 languages.

Needs, needs, the challenge

IVAR needed to implement PIM and DAM (definition of fields, families of products, trees, links between products) and to manage their integration with the company management. The information, present in Excel files, and assets also needed to be reconciled once important in the platform. Once information and assets were structured, there were two objectives to achieve: speeding up the production of printables and updating the website, translated into 5 languages for the 11 international branches of IVAR. In addition, the aim was also achieved to have all the data perfectly aligned and updated in an automated way regardless of human intervention.

Solution

The implementation of the platform has developed in different phases. The first, the most important, was related to the definition of the Data Model, the configuration of users and the customization of interfaces compared to the roles and permissions of users. Then there was the integration phase with the ERP for a massive population of the PIM and enrichment of the contents, then link between Data and Asset and the management of the linked documents. In fase finale, sono state impostate le esportazioni per l’impaginazione dei cataloghi (produzione possibile grazie ad Adobe Indesign) e per la popolazione del sito web completa delle traduzioni in lingua.

Results

The final result is very satisfactory, the platform works at full speed and manages all the product data that must result in an output to the outside. The platform also shared with other business functions that contribute to uploading content has also greatly improved internal technical communication, making it simple and smooth.

The new site, fully updated, has a clearly improved navigability and user experience as well as a more organic and easily searchable content organization.

The production of the catalogues has seen a halving of the times of realization and a degree of precision in the update and modification of the data before unthinkable.

The project then has its natural evolution with the integration with other web applications used by the company, such as the CRM (Salesforce) to which the contacts registered by the site are sent. As well as the connection with an estimation software to which all information and assets are sent from the platform which is therefore the only source of product data for all outputs to the outside.