Case Study: Complete Product Data Management to Create Catalog and Price List

Album is a company that operates within creative lighting design. With Album's products, it is possible to create unique and original atmospheres, bringing light to “only where” is needed. Technology and high craftsmanship (each product in fact designed creatively and entirely made by hands) are the cornerstones of Album’s philosophy. The products, made exclusively in Italy, are exported to all over the world.

Business Needs

After a period of internal structural reassessment, Album needed to recreate its website from scratch. While setting up product pages in WordPress, the marketing manager realized that they needed a structured database repository with complete models for each product piece that should be useful to manage information in multiple languages and enable possible future multichannel developments. Moreover, legacy digital assets organized in local folders had made it very hard to continue to archive files without logic and above all without backup, with the real risk of being able to “miss” everything.

Second but not the least, the complete product catalogs need to be revised to remove those no longer in production, thus it has made the direct integration necessary between the layout and data source.

Pimcore Solution

„The centralized data is easier to manage, to recover, and above all, to control. Each department can verify and modify the data according to its competence. Consequently, the resulting communication tools are always up to date! “

A structure of the data model was defined in Pimcore to give the present information on the paper catalog a centralized location. The data-model feed was instead created, where reconciliation of data coming from Adobe’s formatting and management. Assets have been automatically associated with products. Manual control and reconciliation, for the naming of assets, were implemented in those cases where the automatic operation had not been successful.

Custom interfaces have also been created according to roles and permissions for each expected and operating user on the platform. Before sending the data to the formatter, it was necessary to start a procedure of import of the prices, always coming from the management, for the generation of the various price lists. The production of printables is made possible in two ways: the first via plug-in integration between Pimcore and Adobe Indesign; the second (useful for technical cards and simple brochures) via web2print.

A workflow dedicated to the insertion of translations has also been configured to speed up the insertion of translated texts. Right now, the Album project is already in the implementation phase of e-commerce in a section of the dedicated website.

Business Results

A data centralization platform has allowed Album to speed up the production of marketing materials and to think about completely revamping the company’s website and enabling e-commerce. After a massive import operation of data, assets and prices in Pimcore (also thanks to the support of GMDE technicians), it was possible to quickly produce the price list of the products needed for Album’s participation at “Salone del Mobile” in Milan, an international event renowned in the design environment.