With a reputation as the fastest supplier in the office furniture market, it’s crucial for Hammerbacher to ensure fast and precise process coordination beyond logistics, and to meet the growing demands of the increasingly ecommerce-driven market. However, the company struggled to keep up with modern requirements in product data management: Product information and digital assets were handled manually and scattered across various locations, including the ERP, Excel lists, and image database. To share data with customers, information had to be manually compiled in Excel or continuously added to the price list created in InDesign, which was updated once or twice a year. Even minor product changes required a lot of manual work across all departments — sales, technology, and marketing — to adapt the information to all relevant storage locations. This process was time-consuming and error-prone. Hammerbacher quickly realized the need for a centralized PIM system to consolidate all data, manage it efficiently, and deliver it to customers.
With the cloud-based solution from Contentserv, Hammerbacher can now pave the way for modern product data management — benefiting not only its team but especially its customers and business partners.
The situation
- Product information and digital assets were stored in different places and formats — within the ERP, Excel spreadsheets, and image database.
- The existing ERP system did not support the extraction of granular data.
- Product data and media assets couldn’t be connected with the existing solutions.
- Changes had to be made manually in all relevant storage locations — this applied to product modifications as well as new product entries.
- In addition to being unnecessarily time-consuming, these copy-and-paste tasks were error-prone and undermined critical data consistency across different channels.
Objectives
- Creation of a single source of truth for granular product and media data, enabling quick availability of product information across all channels.
- Implementation of centralized, structured data management supported by workflows, automation, and inheritance for greater efficiency, consistency, accuracy, and data quality.
- Highly automated publication of data sheets and attractive price lists.
- Development of a search portal for customers to allow them to view product details at any time and easily retrieve digital assets.
- Automation of data feeds for customer channels to simplify the marketing of Hammerbacher products with fast and up-to-date product data.
