Product and Content Management Software Consulting for a World Leader in Semiconductor Manufacturing

Customer

The Customer is a world leader in semiconductor manufacturing. The company relies on an international distributor network in their sales strategy.

Challenge

The company was present online with a product catalog that supplied end customers with product information and helped them connect to distributors for purchase. Despite being an important marketing channel, the catalog was complicated in administering and lagged behind on modern approaches to content and product management. It was powered by a custom website builder designed about 10 years ago and not updated thoroughly since. Product information was edited in PDF files and directed to the development team for extraction, processing, and upload on the website. There were about 200 templates for over 500K product SKUs, and each had its own information extraction script.

The developers’ involvement was needed for the management of non-catalog content too. The Customer’s marketing team created web pages in any editor of choice, saved them as HTML documents, and submitted to the developers for upload. This way, about 200 content-rich web pages were updated.

As a result, product and content management workflows came at a high cost and stalled the work of internationally located teams.

To set the direction for their website technology evolution, the Customer needed to start with operational consulting.

Solution

Experienced in IT consulting, ScienceSoft was up for a task. Our consultants reviewed the Customer’s product and content management workflows and concluded that a decade-old legacy system was more difficult and expensive to upgrade than to migrate to a modern application. Upon the business workflow investigation, we advised on the implementation of two types of data management systems – PIM and CMS. Our team explained to the Customer the purpose of each system and the way this technology investment would return to them with operational savings.

Consulting on product information management optimization

To benefit the Customer’s business, a PIM system was required to provide:

• Unified product information data.
• Faster product uploads.
• No need for development support for product information upload.
• Increased efficiency of the marketing team.

As PIM options, ScienceSoft’s consultants shortlisted Pimcore, Akeneo, and a custom Symfony-based solution. The core analysis criteria were:

• Cloud readiness.
• Scalability.
• Ease of implementation.
• Customization flexibility.
• Cost.

Upon the analysis, ScienceSoft awarded the highest score to Akeneo as an optimal PIM solution from the cost-benefit perspective.

Content management optimization consulting

Suggesting to replace an outdated website builder with CMS, our team intended to achieve:

• Effective content management workflow, yet much simplified for not technically savvy marketers.
• Fast content publishing.
• Faster deployment of website changes to affect positively the user experience.

The CMS market is pretty crowded, so our team focused on the three strong performers proved effective in our experience – Pimcore, Drupal, and WordPress – and examined them in the context of the Customer’s business. As important criteria, we focused on:

• Ease of content creation.
• Convenient document management.
• Content personalization.
• Scheduled publishing.
• Visual schemes development.
• Cost.

The comparison chart showed Pimcore as meeting the business and budget requirements of the Customer in the best way.

Results

The Customer obtained a technology-driven approach to their website management. Based on ScienceSoft’s consulting results, the Customer planned to modernize and automate product information and content management workflows. The implementation of Akeneo and Pimcore was introduced as an optimal solution to reduce the development involvement and give the Customer’s marketing team self-service tools to update product information and website content.

Methodologies

Business workflow investigation, Q&A sessions, technology market research.