Case Study: An International Lighting Empire Overcame Their Multi-Language Challenge with PIM

Kanlux is one of the leading companies in the lighting industry with a wide range of modern lighting solutions (more than 1500 product items) including architectural lighting. Kanlux was established as a small family business, but over 26 years it has grown into an international corporation with several hundred employees within its various branches and subsidiaries. Today it has various branches across the world (over 40 countries) not only in Europe but also as far as Australia and Bolivia.

Business Needs

As Kanlux evolved into an international lighting empire, they struggled with managing their product information. The biggest challenge to overcome was that not all the information was in a centralized environment had several ERP systems. They also had other unforeseen challenges during expansion over the years:

The updating and publishing of the datasheets was a time consuming and manual process. Due to the low flexibility of ERP systems in the field of product data modeling, management of a large number of technical attributes was a difficult task to accomplish.
The product website was updated with the data from the ERP system. However, storing product data in several ERP systems creates integration problems such as duplication of information, missing information, and confusion of the tasks that at hand.
The lack of language support over the different facilities. All translations were manually stored in excel files, and there was no real integration with the external entities.
Accessing digital resources was a laborious and complicated process, due to the space limitation of email or cloud apps employees had to split up assets before sending to the final destination (they weren’t able to send all in one swoop.)

Pimcore Solution

Once Kanlux implemented Pimcore PIM all their current challenges, were quickly resolved, they could integrate, consolidate, and manage any type and any amount of digital data. Meaning that they were able to bring all their ERP systems along with their excel assets into a single environment. Everyone now has access to the same product information, there is no missing information, and all data duplications were mitigated. Ensuring 100% consistency of the digital resources in all channels, and automatic conversion between various graphics formats.

Everyone now is working off the same and most up to date data, it doesn’t matter the language preference or the department they are from as long as they are involved in the process of creating data. Making it more accessible to automate and generate PDF datasheets, product catalogs, and user manuals.

Business Results

Kanlux saw the results of the Pimcore PIM implementation in no time. They were able to alleviate the time consumption for the designers now that all assets were in a centralized location. It also allowed all employees to have access to the latest data and avoided the creation of information duplication. They overcame their language challenge (26 languages) with their editors (+20 editors), and now was able to effectively collaborate in a single data system that has automation for multiple channels.