15 Sep CatalogExpress provides Helestra with more efficiency in the import and provision of product data

Helestra Leuchten GmbH is a manufacturer and importer of lighting based in Leppersdorf near Saxony. The company currently employs 35 people. Helestra Leuchten GmbH mainly sells its products in Germany. However, the lighting manufacturer is also active in some European countries. Helestra delivers its products to specialist retailers, wholesalers and large furniture stores with lighting departments. The requirements for product data provision are correspondingly different.

Initial situation:

The process of importing data from ERP into the PIM system was very time-consuming. A data export needed to be made in the ERP system. Helestra then imported this manually into the PIM system. Regular data synchronization thus only took place manually and as required.

In addition to importing the product data, the processes for exporting the product data to ETIM 6 were also inflexible. Due to the upcoming changeover to ETIM 8, Helestra questioned these processes once again. It was noticed that in the past, a lot of data had been created manually, bypassing the system. A large number of different EXCEL tables accumulated on the shared drives. It was often unclear which was the current version. Errors were corrected only in some of the data, but not in the underlying error sources. As a result, the error rate increased as well.

Objective:

Helestra wants to have more efficiency in the import and provision of product data through

• Easy import of product data from the ERP to the PIM system
• Reduce manual effort and frequency of errors during data creation
• Flexible product data supply
  • Multilingual EXCEL price lists
  • Derivation of product data according to ETIM 8
  • BMEcat ETIM generation

Solution

After Helestra had made positive experiences with nexoma GmbH regarding the Pimcore support, it was a logical step to handle the import/export issue with nexoma as well. In this context, it made sense to take a closer look at the CatalogExpress software.

In the end, Helestra decided to implement CatalogExpress because of its functionality and flexible adaptability.

Importing product data is much more efficient by using CatalogExpress. Data synchronization between the ERP and PIM systems runs automatically in the background at regular intervals. Product data which is changed or corrected in the ERP system now flows automatically to the website. As a result, the database is always up-to-date and consistent on all channels. Error correction only has to take place once, resulting in enormous labor and cost savings.

Thanks to CatalogExpress, Helestra has been able to significantly improve the data quality in its customers’ systems. They did not use the option of providing data in BMEcat in a consistent way, because the effort was incomparably higher. With CatalogExpress, it is now easier to provide up-to-date data at a higher frequency and in different formats. Anything from BMEcat ETIM 8 to an EXCEL price list in French is possible.

By integrating the image processing solution “ImageMagick” into CatalogExpress, Helestra was able to further optimize its processes. Images are automatically cropped and watermarked during the export process. For each customer, Helestra can define individual editing steps.

Due to CatalogExpress’ new Mapping UI, Helestra will soon be able to handle data mapping itself. Previously, the mapping of data was done by nexoma. As a result, Helestra reduces the need for coordination with nexoma and is able to respond even faster to the data requirements of its customers.

Helestra wants to think more and more with their data in data infrastructures. The first step towards this was Pimcore as a central storage location. With CatalogExpress, the second important part of the infrastructure has now followed – data handling and data distribution. Helestra now has more efficiency in the import and provision of product data.

This is how Helestra evaluated the collaboration with nexoma:

“Our goal is always to provide meaningful input and fit into the structures that will get us to our goal efficiently in terms of time and costs at the end of the day. In doing so, we always had very direct access to the various people involved at nexoma (project management/developers). This allowed us to provide direct feedback to each other about what went well, what went poorly, and how we might be able to organize things in a useful way to optimize the overall effort. All in all, we felt that this worked well in the collaboration during the implementation of CatalogExpress. Finally, CatalogExpress is a piece of infrastructure for us that is individually built into the business as well as into processes – in that sense, it’s a super product.”

Technology

• CatalogExpress
• Scheduled Processes
• BMEcat Mapping
• ImageMagick
• Pimcore
• Email Distribution