Case Study: A Single Source Database Implementation for Q8Oils to Improve Product Data Performance

Q8Oils a lubricants manufacturing company and is part of the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation (KPC), one of the world’s largest oil companies. They have over 3 600 employees and a turnover of over USD 10 billion per year. The company develops, blends, and delivers a comprehensive range of lubricants, with a portfolio of more than 1 000 products to suit every application, from the smallest engine to the largest machine.

Business Needs

The client was facing data inconsistency between various systems that led to inaccurate data input and differing usage instructions between the main product lines. The existing database was not seen as a reliable and accurate source for feeding up-to-the-minute information to their website.

After a thorough analysis of existing processes and data, the client zeroed on defining a new single-source database structure that would (also) precisely cater to their functional business requirements.

The solution is going to be not only a single-source database but also a single structure database that unites 4 business lines having very divergent data processing needs.

Pimcore Solution

Leveraging the flexibility of the Pimcore platform, Pimcore partner Tetrasoft implemented the solution as per the client’s requirements, adding or broadening specific user interface controls for efficient data input (favoring and selecting standard text instead of free text input over all products). The solution includes:

The Dynamic Dropdown Tag: A Combo box was created, made of a list of entries defined as external objects. It’s a smart combo, and typing a few characters filters the list interactively.
The Multiselect Dynamic Dropdown Tag: It gives the ability to select multiple values in one field.
The Dynamic Dropdown Tag (cascade): The same, but several levels of the combo are dynamically interconnected: the list of the child combo is determined by the choice made in the parent.
Calculated fields are updated in real-time when input elements are updated in the form. No need to manually save the data.

With the implemented solution, the client is now able to improve response times from several minutes to 5 seconds for pages with extensive collections of blocks (70+). This was achieved with some clever “under the hood” code reengineering by the Pimcore partner Tetrasoft.

Business Results

The solution now provides a single source database for all product data input activities throughout Europe, improving operational efficiency and reliability of the product data across different business units.