From a PIM to a Content Delivery Platform, the digital growth of B&B Italia

B&B Italia is an Italian company, worldwide renowned and recognized as leader of the design furniture market, both in the consumer segment (B&B Italia Home Division) as well as in the professional one (B&B Italia Contract Division).

Established in 1966 as the result of the entrepreneurial vision of Piero Ambrogio Busnelli, the Group has built its success on the ability to represent contemporary culture through design, and anticipate trends, constantly seeking to respond to changes in taste and living needs.With an international presence that covers 80 countries, the company has built years over years a sales network made of point of sales characterized by deep technical knowledge as well as a high professionality. On top of this, B&B Italia qualified its presence abroad with the opening of flagship stores in the most iconic world cities.

B&B Italia started its Digital Transformation project to enhance Marketing & Sales performances, by organizing product information and contents to be published on all channels out of a single repository. OIM Omnichannel Information Management, the PIM platform proposed by GMDE based on Pimcore, allowed B&B Italia to achieve such result. The integration with a Content Delivery Platform has been a consequential project implementation, aimed to optimize professional customer experience both in the B2C and B2B scenarios, providing a sharper and brighter response to the globalization challenge (through the availability of multilingual, local contents).

The initial requirement of B&B Italia was to implement a PIM aimed at facilitating the management of products information and their subsequent publication on the main communication channels (web site, printed catalogs and printable web2print). The PIM had to collect data from the ERP, PLM and existing website then send the information to the new website, produced by an external agency and developed on Magento2. Collecting data from different sources, organizing them into different data models then publishing on Magento2 were the initial challenges.

Subsequently, B&B Italia expressed interest in an extension of the project regarding the distribution of library content, the management of BIM content and the development of a reserved User Area to allow the download of all the selected content.

GMDE immediately proposed the OIM Omnichannel Information Management platform for information organization. Flexible data models and a deep integration with existing systems, have allowed OIM to meet the needs and requests of B&B Italia.

In addition, the development of a Content Delivery application (GCDP, GMDE Content Delivery Platform), integrated with the PIM and "in hosting" in a different infrastructure, has made it possible to manage processing loads, the storage capacity and bandwidth consumption generated by content delivery services. Content Delivery is in fact designed to allow the controlled distribution of content to a professional user (architects, designers...) that can access wherever they are in the world and according to their times, without affecting the resources used in production.

“The implementation of the Content Delivery library has allowed us to divert much of the heavier traffic - that generated by the downloading of large volumes of assets by furniture professionals - to a dedicated infrastructure, reducing its impact on operations in the consumer world, while strengthening control over the distribution of sensitive digital content. A solution that GMDE has proposed to us in course of work and that has immediately met our favor”.
Daniele Lanfranchi, IT Director B&B