The nearly 140-year-old industrial giant, Alfa Laval, needed to consolidate and streamline product information to create a seamless digital customer experience.
Alfa Laval offers a wide range of advanced products in heat transfer, separation, and fluid handling, all with high technical complexity. This placed significant demands on their Product Information Management (PIM).
Like many other companies, Alfa Laval struggled with a lack of integrated services and relied on Excel and manual processes to keep product information up to date for digital services.
In many cases, critical product knowledge only existed in the minds of individual sales representatives, making it difficult to transfer into a digital customer journey.
To accelerate time-to-market for digital services and online sales, Alfa Laval implemented Inriver PIM and an Azure-based data architecture.
The investment in PIM has streamlined product data collection and distribution, ensuring data consistency across the entire value chain. The platform gathers all essential product details, including images, industry standards, marketing texts, and technical documentation.
With real-time updates, product changes quickly take effect across digital sales and customer channels, allowing Alfa Laval to deliver valuable digital services to customers.
Alfa Laval’s PIM solution serves as a central Product Marketing Hub, enabling full control over the product portfolio and precise targeting of messaging.
By consolidating critical product documentation and enabling enrichment with commercial, customer-centric product information, the platform has become a cornerstone of Alfa Laval’s digital sales expertise.
We chose a strategic investment in PIM because our challenge was that knowledge about how a product works and is used was scattered across independent documents and databases.
The PIM solution has enabled efficient creation and distribution of enriched product catalogs across multiple digital sales channels, partner portals, and marketplaces.
With the ability to customize and optimize application-specific product information, Alfa Laval can now better guide customers and gain a competitive advantage in online sales.
By leveraging new data services, Alfa Laval has strengthened its global market position, making PIM a crucial component of their digital transformation strategy.
We worked side by side with Alfa Laval in an agile process throughout the implementation and rollout. Close collaboration with both the business side and IT was essential to the project's success.
The PIM solution is built on Microsoft's Azure platform to consolidate and digitize knowledge about Alfa Laval's industrial products in support of the digital customer journey. The solution uses Inriver PIM on Azure (IPMC) as its core PIM application.
By using Microsoft Azure to manage typical bottlenecks in data workflow handling of millions of data elements, the solution can further scale and optimize outbound channels with low application dependency in the data workflow. This has enabled a product data model capable of delivering market-specific, localized data sets to realize a truly localized product experience for their customers.
The Azure-based scalability has given Alfa Laval reliable business operations and the ability to expand product data services into APIs that integrate with a range of business applications without added maintenance costs for data integration.
The Inriver application is supplemented by both a Cosmos DB and a Storage account with geo-redundancy for scalable, global access. Using Function Apps and Event Grid Topics, we notify both internal and external data consumers of important changes.
The Storage account and Cosmos DB support both B2B and B2C e-commerce platforms, as well as several internal applications. Data access is configured via API Management, and requests are authorized with Active Directory.
Our partnership with Alfa Laval has been a true collaboration, where we provided expert guidance in solution delivery, Inriver PIM, and Azure-based technologies.
This has enabled the efficient creation and distribution of targeted and enriched product catalogs across a wide range of digital sales channels, partner portals, and marketplaces. The solution also allows for customization and optimization of application-specific product information, which is key to guiding customers and enhancing online sales performance.
With the implementation of new data services, Alfa Laval has strengthened its market position in an increasingly globalized industry. The PIM solution has become a cornerstone of their digital transformation strategy.
Creating a seamless digital purchasing experience requires a focused approach, ensuring that customers - regardless of industry or location - can trust our online recommendations just as much as they trust our sales representatives. We have now almost fully realized that ambition.
