Perfion feeds product information on 50,000 SKUs to 20 websites in 28 languages
“Perfion is extremely suitable for versioning and language versioning, but what I like most is its flexibility. The ease of creating new fields and importing and exporting data gives us the ability to handle most things ourselves." Rune Boa Nielsen, Project Manager, AVK Holding A/S
Challenge
As one of the world’s leading valve manufacturers with many thousands of SKUs and 28 communication languages, the AVK Group has enormous amounts of product information to keep track of.
Previously, it wasn’t that easy. Product data was stored in a central database, while all the “soft” product information - such as translations and marketing texts - was stored in the CMS system, which was not built for it. Consequently, the system’s performance was poor and it was difficult to maintain, import and export data. Data sheets and price lists were generated via an external ‘engine’ that worked with the CMS system, but AVK was dependent on assistance from an external partner if changes were required in the data sheet setup.
Solution & Benefits
AVK needed a replacement for the old system and the choice fell on the Perfion PIM system for the following reasons:
- Perfion’s integration with Dynamics NAV/AX and Sana Commerce, the platform of AVK’s online shops
- With Perfion’s built-in Publishing module, AVK can generate price lists and datasheets quickly and easily (or completely automatically) with the relevant elements in the desired languages and with the chosen price variants
The Perfion PIM system delivers product information in all languages directly to AVK’s public websites and to data sheets and price lists:
- 20 websites in 28 languages. All product data comes from Perfion, from which it is exported once a day to a separate API site that forwards the exported data to the Sitecore CMS system.
- Two online shops based on Sana Commerce and with close integration to Dynamics NAV. Perfion is used for data enrichment and product navigation control.
- Price lists of up to 150 pages generated with Perfion’s Publishing module. The covers are created in InDesign.
- Several thousand PDF data sheets with all information about the products in the desired languages.
AVK also plans to use Perfion for:
- Providing data for industry portals that require files with product data in very specific formats. This is possible with the Perfion Action Mapping module.
- Streamlining the translators’ work by integrating a translation tool with Perfion, so that the system remembers previous translations and XLIFF export files can be extracted from Perfion and imported again after translation.
Perfion has made external consultants superfluous
With Perfion, AVK distributes high-quality product data because employees can make reports and searches that provide a complete overview - for example of which data is missing on products.
The employees have thus become much more self-reliant. This saves time and has produced greater contentment and job satisfaction. Rune Boa Nielsen explains:
"With Perfion we can do things ourselves without support from external consultants. Consequently we can act faster. E.g. we needed extra fields for filtering products. I could add them myself in half an hour and the users could use them immediately afterwards.
When it comes to employee job satisfaction, Perfion has also been worth the investment. And it saves us time.”
About AVK Holding A/S
The AVK Group is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of valves, hydrants and accessories for water and gas distribution, sewage treatment and fire protection. The group is headquartered in Denmark and has over 100 companies in 36 countries. The number of employees exceeds 3,900 worldwide.