St. Benno Buch und Zeitschriften Verlagsgesellschaft mbH is a Catholic book and magazine publisher and a denominational mail order company based in Leipzig. Its shareholders are the dioceses of Dresden-Meißen, Erfurt, Görlitz and Magdeburg[1] The predecessor, which was liquidated in 1991 under the name St. Benno-Verlag, was the only Catholic publishing house in the German Democratic Republic.
The publishing house was founded in 1951 and generates around €50 million per year with over 100 employees.
With Netresearch, we have gained a strong partner. Netresearch utilises the latest technologies and can therefore react quickly to new requirements on our part. We now benefit from a modern system with an intuitive operating concept. Thank you for the great implementation!
Stephan Radig
Head of Online Editing
St. Benno Verlag GmbH
St. Benno Verlag operated middleware that formed a link between the merchandise management system and the Magento shop system. This was provided by a service provider, but was no longer developed or maintained. This ESB(EnterpriseServiceBus) had grown historically and was enriched with various individual processes, some of which were not documented. In addition, it offered the possibility of importing further large amounts of data from three providers via an interface.
This ESB was to be replaced, but the functional scope of around 15 individual processes had to be retained and even be expandable in the future. The aim was to harmonise and standardise the necessary data supply and generally optimise the workflow to increase data quality.
In order to make a subsequent go-live as smooth as possible, a 1:1 test environment was set up and worked in from the outset. The first step was to set up an Akeneo PIM in place of the previous middleware and adapt its data structure to match the current structure. Once the basis for data import had been established, the interfaces to the company's own ERP system and the suppliers were set up. For this purpose, the product import had to be adapted so that successful merging could take place. In order to take over some of the previous functionalities of the middleware, the DataHub was used to filter and select data, for example. This DataHub acts as the interface between all data deliveries to the Akeneo PIM. Once the data flows into the Akeneo PIM in the desired quality, further changes and adjustments were made to the system to meet the customer's needs. Most recently, mapping was set up between data from suppliers and St. Benno. This is also where the complex rights and roles concept, which was specially developed for the customer, comes into play.
With the standardised and automated supply process, countless other suppliers can now be connected quickly. This forms the basis for the strategic goal of establishing a marketplace in the future. By using the blugento DataHub, the complexity of the variety of interfaces is reduced to a minimum, which minimises effort and simplifies future development. In addition, many of the required functions can be integrated here and, in cooperation with the Akeneo PIM, form the complete range of functions that had to be adopted or newly defined. Furthermore, the data quality between the supplier and St. Benno could be synchronised, which significantly reduces downstream data maintenance.
