Netresearch has provided us with a powerful product information management system and customised it to our needs. As a result, we can now manage over 400,000 products and 24 million product features easily and efficiently. Our online editorial team is delighted!
Stephan Radig
Head of Online Editing
St. Benno Verlag GmbH
The Vivat! online shop offers a comprehensive range of Christian literature and gifts of all kinds. In addition to various in-house productions, it also offers over 40,000 products from other manufacturers and publishers for sale.
The aim was to be able to launch and manage over 400,000 products in a short space of time. Each product in turn has around 60 individual product attributes. Managing this total of 24 million individual product attributes is a major challenge. The old system was difficult to use and was characterised by instability. In the past, this led to a high error rate and slowed down work processes. The aim of the project was therefore to replace the individually developed middleware.
St. Benno Verlag's online shop was therefore to be restructured as a "marketplace". Excellent product information management (PIM) is essential for this. The right tool for this is the enterprise open source PIM system Akeneo. The powerful product information management system is able to centrally manage technical and marketing-relevant information on products and product catalogues that are obtained from various sources and channels. This had to be customised to the specific requirements of the publishing house through in-house development.
In order to realise this vision, a faster, simpler but also error-free product system was made possible. The challenge was to merge product information from different input data sources and different formats or data structures. To achieve this, we customised the Akeneo open source system by integrating the blugento data hub. The blugento data hub connects the PIM with Shopware and enables the transfer of data within the systems. After the transfer, data can be output in a targeted manner for the respective e-commerce channel.
The blugento data hub is fully automated so that errors are avoided in advance and the product data is continuously updated. This means that product data can be created and transferred to the defined systems more quickly. In addition to the shop system, it is also possible to synchronise other systems, such as enterprise resource planning systems (ERP), with the blugento data hub as required.
Product data is managed intuitively thanks to the customisation of the Akeneo PIM. The instability of the old system has been replaced by the automation processes of the PIM. The workload has also been significantly reduced through filter and mass processing options, which contributes to increased efficiency and easier usability.
This has optimised the speed of the product system, increasing the number of active products by 60%. The customer's vision of operating as a marketplace with a comprehensive product range was realised and the expectations of our individual development were more than exceeded.
We can look back on many years of cooperation with St. Benno-Verlag GmbH. We have overcome challenges and successfully realised the project. Along the way, we have overcome difficulties together and stood together as partners. At the end of the day, St. Benno Verlag can now boast a significant increase in sales thanks to the activation of 120,000 products.
