Pimcore Silver Partner Hamari Agency building UK community

Our team of web developers has found that organisations that depend on multichannel commerce are best placed to get their products to market quicker with a PIM. Product descriptions and their media assets can be managed in one place ensuring online outlets and print channels are optimised with the best possible content.

Hamari Agency relaunched the website for MyLocalMortgage using a back end that could manage both data and content using the Pimcore customer management framework acting as the backbone of the master data and the content management system. The data management feature allows mortgage brokers the ability to map their data so that users can search by postcode or city location in order to find mortgage advisors in their area. 

Product data in the construction industry supply chain

Manufacturers and brands assign their products with properties and attributes. Distributors want to market these products to the next link in the supply chain and customise product information to differentiate themselves from their competition. There are all kinds of reasons why someone might want to change the way a product is described which can lead to inconsistencies and errors. Pimcore lets suppliers upload product data into their customer's PIM with existing data model rules. This allows granular permissions to people inside and outside an organisation which encourages harmonised descriptions throughout the supply chain.

Pimcore has been the go-to solution for large enterprises and in recent years this flexible open-source framework has enabled SME companies to budget for a PIM helping them drive revenue in time savings that lead to better content and higher conversions. SME manufacturers and brands are scaling up their online sales to include D2C (direct to consumer) while continuing to develop their B2B e-commerce channels. The development of the product information management ecosystem is streamlining data within single organisations and across external supply chains while standardising product data practices industry-wide.

Product data working groups

The UK construction industry is increasing its efforts to implement better product information practices that can accommodate a ‘golden thread’ of data as described in the UK government report ‘Building a Safer Future: Independent Review of Building Regulations and Fire Safety’ published in the wake of the Grenfell tragedy. It recommends that product specifications can be identified throughout a building’s life cycle that would naturally include many different stakeholders.

Hamari Agency works with product data working groups and hosts roundtables with leading figures in the construction industry to push forward the standardisation of product information best practices. We found there are crossovers between product data operational excellence and the principles of a golden thread that could be scaled globally. Product data standards can harmonise descriptions throughout the construction industry with a single source of truth on certain regulated items but this still leaves millions of products whose descriptions are reinvented each time they are transacted.

This leads to unnecessary work for each company in the supply chain, many of who are still using Excel to move data through their own systems, creating duplication, silos, and mistakes. There was a consensus that product data standardisation throughout the construction industry would not happen quickly and Hamari Agency proposed that the speed of progress would partly depend on how agile manufacturers and distributors were with their product information management systems as data is processed and transacted from one stakeholder to another.

Pimcore Plug-in development 

We are committed to growing our contributions to the Pimcore community and developed an In-Browser Code Editor to Edit PHP, Twig, JS, CSS code from within the Pimcore admin page. This bundle works best on dev/staging sites where cache is disabled. 

We hope you find this time-saving plug-in useful. There are more plug-ins and extensions in the pipeline and would love to get your feedback and answer any product data questions you might have. If you would like to participate in our product information roundtables and webinars let us know and we will keep you up to date on our events.