Case Study: Unified product catalog for SPAR Middle Volga Holding
The Russian division of leading grocery retailer SPAR unified a catalog of 260k products for 3 companies: SPAR (retail), Sweet Life (wholesale food supplies), and Sweet Life Food Service (HoReCa food supplies).
SPAR Middle Volga united product catalogs of companies belonging to the holding company with the help of Pimcore solution. IT consulting company Odyssey Consulting Group was the implementation partner.
Customer Details
Customer Key Facts
Project prerequisites: the holding company needs a unified product catalog
SPAR Middle Volga holding consists of 3 companies: SPAR (retail), Sweet Life (wholesale supply of food products) and Sweet Life Food Service (supply of products for HoReCa). The assortment of companies in the group overlapped, but each had its own system to work with the catalog and individual design templates for product cards. Due to this, the companies' employees were forced to duplicate each other's work in different systems. The management of the holding decided to create a unified catalog and turned to Odyssey Consulting Group to solve the issue.
Project implementation: Pimcore - a system for working with assortment, supplemented by intelligent data analysis
Pimcore has become the master system for product information. Odyssey Consulting Group consultants also made modifications to the system to automate routine operations for holding employees. Pimcore now notifies an employee if they enter information about already existing in the system product. A special pre-configured report helps to check the validity of certificates for each product. A personal account was created for suppliers, where they enter information about products into the system. This approach helps speed up the appearance of new products in the catalog and reduces the number of manual operations for employees: information from suppliers only needs to be checked. In order to speed up verification of information from suppliers, Odyssey Consulting Group experts created a tool for automatic verification of images. The system checks not only file format and image size, but also conformity to company requirements: white background, image clarity, absence of filters, collages, extra objects in the photo.
Project results: 260 thousand SKUs under control
In June 2021, the system was put into commercial operation. Today more than 80 users and 10 suppliers are connected to Pimcore. The system processes data on over 260,000 SKUs. Odyssey Consulting Group and SPAR continue to collaborate on the support and development of the solution.