Invelop summary
Background
A successful player in its niche in the B2B area, that until now hasn't had the need to be in the digital space. But are starting to understand that they must begin that journey, but it feels like a too large commitment and wants to start smaller.
Since 2007 Invelop has been an innovative, flexible and quality focused company, who offers specific products for companies working with packaging of goods.
Challenges
The world is changing and to keep up the customer needs to build an online precence and take charge of their product catalog. Today there is many different versions of produkt information sent out to different customers. Too many problems due to errors in data and very hard to fix it.
The competitor’s are starting to build a digital presence and we must keep up. We need to look into new rev streams but at the same time not loos old ones. We want to move slowly and carefully into the online commerce space.
Goals
- Have on place for all product data, that can be accessed by all, both customers and internal resources.
- Ready for next step in online commerce, taking orders and transactions using webb channels
Business needs
An online catalog...
At the heart of the solution is a product catalog that can be used by customers and resellers. This service is online and has a public and logged in state, where registered customers can log in and see more information about the products.
...with key functionality, like
- Real time online product catalog, current and correct
- Logged in view, with more information and larger assortment
- Expired products
- Extending attribute information
- The online catalog in used by customers and end customers directly, and by internal sales reps when showing and demoing, configure solutions to the customer
... and still a Physical catalog...
Uses Norce Commerce for building up the product catalog based on the supplier data. Norce handles cost based pricing, and other offerings.
... with key functionality, like
- Catalog price is logged in the PIM, to make sure that it is used when showing changes
- An export with coming catalog prices is created from the the PIM system to be used by the publishing software.
... and a tight integration with a large customer
The larger customer has their own procurement systems that sends order to our ERP using EDI. This is a special channel of products and sometimes specific content designed for the these customers.
... with key functionality, like
- Special assortment and content
- Special prices for each large customer
... and lastly they need a PIM platform...
A Product information management tool, one place for all product information to gather and be enriched for marketing purposes
... with key functionality, like
- Rich UI
- Specially designed workflows for enrichment
- Reports on products missing data or bad quality of data
- Preview of products (automatically launch the online catalog)
- Automatically import new products from manufacturing systems
- Automatically provide third party data on products
- Send products for translation
System landscape
| Role | Description | Provider |
|---|---|---|
| Online catalog | Partner built presentation app, that directly fetch product data from Norce. Used by both guests, logged in customers and internal sales. | CMS is Umbraco |
| Physical catalog | Bi-yearly exports to publishing software. | Indesign |
| Product information management (PIM) | PIM system, contains whole product catalog | Norce PIM |
| ERP | The erp system that handles the business and has the inventory information. | Business central |
| Manufacturer system (PLM, PDM) | Product data information from the development systems. BOM information and other data, like manuals, etc. | Plytix |
| Translation service | Integration with 3rd party translation service. | Contentor |
| Reseller procurement systems | Large customers has procurement systems that require a catalog file with current prices and availability. | Odoo and others |