Case Study: A Consolidated Data Platform Improves Customer Satisfaction For One of Europe’s Largest Wholesalers

PF Concept offers a uniquely comprehensive portfolio of promotional solutions fully customizable to any company’s promotional needs. Established in 1984 and headquartered in the Netherlands, PF Concept, a leader in the European market, is a part of the Polyconcept Group. Their subsidiaries operate across five continents, selling in over a hundred countries. They’re a preferred one-stop-shop for more than 10,000 promotional products.

Business Needs

PF Concept was struggling to efficiently manage and distribute product information due to a heterogeneous IT environment, i.e., too many systems for product management, and there was no single source for managing product content. The maintenance of these systems was costly, complicated, error-prone, time-consuming, plus laden with issues such as data loss and redundancy. Some inevitable challenges faced by the client were:

A time-consuming process for data imports and exports because of activities related to data preparation and quality assurance.
No workflow and no tracking system in place to know in which stage a particular product is.
No dashboard with alerts and notifications on data quality issues.
No performance measurement or the data quality process in place.
Employees spending long hours in manually checking, redoing, chasing, and correcting product data.

Since too many systems were involved, product information management and maintaining the data quality was getting difficult day by day, resulting in errors, leading to business inefficiencies, and causing a slower time-to-market. Another significant need for the client was to accomplish PIM integration with their Magento Enterprise based webshop.

Pimcore Solution

PF Concept required PIM, DAM, and translation of product content altogether; they also needed data hierarchies, ease of adding new product attributes, workflows, notifications, dashboards, reporting, and an interface to the webshop. PF Concept wanted its Magento based webshop and other independent applications to be connected to a single source solution where all products related information and updates can be found. Thus, the need for the Pimcore Platform came into the picture.

Our partner, Javra Software, implemented Pimcore’s data management component for its capability and flexibility to provide PIM+DAM in one system. The implementation was done through an agile software development approach, including:

Implemented PIM, translation, and digital assets management (DAM) functionalities to resolve data quality challenges.
Data inheritance from a product to variants led to a situation with less redundant data.
Integrated Pimcore PIM with various applications such as PF ERP system, and PF Webshop, and Polyconcept Global Supply Chain.
Introduced new product attributes.
Built workflow and visual graph representation of the product life cycle with alerts and notifications for better tracking and decision-making.

Pimcore’s data management component now acts as the primary source, which is directly connected to the webshop so that there is no loss of data passing through different channels. It now handles 200+ attributes, 25,000 products in 15 languages.

Business Results

With Pimcore as a single source of information for product data, PF Concept has been able to implement an efficient data management process for its product department, and eCommerce, sales and marketing department. Pimcore PIM is now directly connected to the PF Concept Magento webshop with more than 29 store views. The webshop is accessed from more than 50+ different countries. All product-related data comes from the Pimcore environment.

A single hub of publishing content to the Magento webshop is managed for categories that cover the whole of Europe. PF Concept, a EUR 100+ million company, is now able to handle, on average, more than 500+ concurrent users during business hours.

Pimcore’s data management component not only controlled the loss of data passing through different channels, its flexible data modeling capabilities, and extensive user rights & role management made it possible to set up individual user interfaces much quickly and efficiently than in the previous situation. Costs curbed drastically.