Product Information Management: The Highway To Retail

To standardise the processes of product data communication, Melitta Europa is standardising and automating its product data management using probate’s Product Information Management (PIM).

Product Information Management: Customers expect to be able to find complete information about products at any time during their purchase research. A challenge for trade and industry because meeting these demands across all online and offline channels requires the right technological processes in the background. It also quickly became clear to the brand manufacturer Melitta that product data could best be provided electronically and according to uniform message standards via the Global Data Synchronisation Network (GDSN).

Until then, the European national companies provided their local retail partners with information on Melitta products, sometimes through direct data exchange or self-service portals into which product data had to be uploaded manually. Internally at Melitta, product data maintenance is also spread across many manual processes.

Standardised Product Data Management

To efficiently supply retailers with product data via the GDSN, Melitta planned to standardise its processes throughout Europe. With the introduction of a professional Product Information Management (PIM) system, the long-established company primarily wanted to centralise the maintenance of product data and publish product data automatically and quickly via the GDSN data pool.

IT coordinator Friedrich Plöger and his team were looking for a PIM whose data structure precisely met the requirements of global master data pools but at the same time fully mapped the complex product logic of the Melitta range. “Practice showed that we first had to develop a common view of product data,” says Viktoria Alef, Business Process Manager at Melitta Europe. For example, some Melitta products can be unfolded while being folded up and packed in the box. For the French market, the national company communicated the dimensions for the developed product, while the trading partners in neighbouring countries received the smaller sizes of the packaged version.

All Data Flow Together In Product Information Management

The new PIM pulls the master data directly from SAP, which is Melitta’s leading system for primary master data. This way, all information about the latest product flows together in Product Information Management. Media data from Digital Asset Management (DAM) are also linked in the product entries. These entries decide which media content will be played out to trading partners later. With the creation of the data records, the PIM gets the approvals for the data publication for each customer and country. The national companies, therefore, still influence which data in their market segment is sent to the customer. After the final OK, probate publishes PIM automatically sends the product information to the GDSN via the atrophy master data pool and thus reaches all trading partners in the target markets – without annoying individual emails, manual uploads, or endless file lists.

Outlook: Digital Customer Journey In Retail

In the next step, Melitta wants to connect its online shop to the central data structure. “In the long term, we want to merge our product communication for our two most important sales channels and also use it for publication via other channels.”

The Melitta shops should obtain their product data directly from the central PIM. The European unification project for product data at Melitta is taking the next step in the direction of the digital customer journey for all coffee lovers.

Also Read: Innovative Production And More Customer Services Thanks To Data Transparency