Elektroskandia

Client situation

Elektroskandia Norge AS is a leading wholesaler of electrical equipment, electrical systems, industrial supplies and utilities. More than 300 employees achieve a turnover of approximately 270 million euros. The company is a subsidiary of the international Rexel group.
Elektroskandia provides around 52.000 articles to its vast array of suppliers and partners within 23 flag ship stores, Proffmarkets and nine major central warehouses across Norway. The logistic team offers 7x24 hours per week service and guarantees delivery in extreme short time frames. The headquarter is based in Oslo.

Challenge

Elektroskandia was using an old system called Xmodus that generated the Print catalog in Word. The user interface was inflexible. Per product the product manager could only use 7 columns for features / technical attributes. The order of products was very difficult to maintain and in the solution there was only one catalogue structure system available.

The layout of the catalogue had to be finished in Word for every new catalogue. Replacements and page breaks had to be done every time over and over again, as changes were overwritten with every new export.

The performance of the whole system became slower with more products in the catalogue. Product updates could only be done by technical people and not by the product managers themselves (because of database syncs). Customer specific catalogues are very complex to generate.

Solution

Softlution made a new Solution Design for Heiler PPM (PIM) and PMM (Media manager project). In the new system, more than 52.000 products have been uploaded (will grow to 90.000 until 2010). Also, Elektroskandia now has 6 different catalogue structures (Blokknumber, UNSPSC, X-Modus, Hagemeyer/Rexel, Statistical group, Product manager group), about 400-500 suppliers of which are 50 the major suppliers.

The implementation of Heiler PPM 4.5 was done on a Windows 2003 Server 64 Bit server using a MS SQL Server 2005 database. Internally, the PIM System is leading and integrated with the ERP solution on an AS/400. There is also an export Interface to the online shop, called Nettbutik.

Results

The benefits for Elektroskandia with the new solution are:

• Quicker entry of product information and price parameter into PIM and ERP (via PIM)
• Better overview of the product information
• Flexible user interface
• Improvement in the product quality
• Enhancement of product texts (not limited in number of characters)
• Technical information / features
• Multi classification with new technical structure system
• Easy creation of customer specific catalogs (print and electronic)
• Deliver electronic catalogs to market places (e.g. IBX)
• Flexible print catalog generation with high automation
• Picture/document handling – central database
• Mid- / longterm: growth of product assortment, supplier integration