Electrolux

Implementation of Product Information Management Database (PIM)

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Background

Electrolux Group is one of the world’s leading suppliers of domestic appliances. They operate under a number of different brands, including AEG and Zanussi. In addition to domestic appliances, the group has a significant business in stocking, distributing and selling spare parts, acc essories and consumables. Electrolux partnered with The DOT Group to create an integration platform to support the PIM and provide data feeds to the web shops and review engines.

Business challenge

Traditionally the spare parts business had been predominantly a B2B business with spare parts been supplied to service engineers. But Electrolux wanted to lead the way in supplying spare parts, accessories and consumables directly to their customers across all European markets in localised formats.

As innovative and idealistic as that sounds, there were multiple challenges to realising this vision.

  1. The product information was distributed across several internal systems.
  2. The existing systems could not be provisioned to enable third party user updates of product information.
  3. No suitable product hierarchies were available for a B2C channel.
  4. Existing product data was inconsistent and un reliable.

Big wins

A new integration platform was developed in MS SQL using SSIS and hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS).

It provides a single view of spare parts, accessories and consumables received from multiple sources via a web portal.

Daily updates to products, pricing, stock levels and descriptions are sent to 50 branded web shops, in 20 languages across 20 countries.

  • A single, reliable source of previously silo’d data from warehouses, appliances and pricing.
  • Designed to allow for additional consumers’ of data to be easily added and serviced.
  • Integration with a market leading review engine.
  • 24/7 web portal access for product maintenance and reporting.
  • Single source of translated product descriptions in 20 languages available for re-use.
  • Localised search engine optimisation (SEO) meta data built into every product update.
  • Archive created for product updates.
  • Provision of accessible sales data for each product, by web shop.
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