Hoenderdaal: "Product information increasingly drives our business"

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Product information is becoming increasingly important.

In a market where good product information is becoming increasingly important, manufacturers play a leading role in providing that content. After all, as manufacturers, they have all the relevant information. The big challenge is to manage and distribute that data as efficiently as possible. For this, Hoenderdaal Fasteners decided to implement a PIM system together with specialist Innovadis. "That system is now the engine of data in our organization, with which we can distinguish ourselves."

Bart Veldhuizen, general manager of Hoenderdaal Fasteners looks back on the past four years with Alexander van Dijk, commercial manager of Innovadis. "When I started as product manager ten years ago, we worked with Excel and EZ-base, which at that time was not as rich as it is now. As everyone did their own thing and the demand from customers for good data grew, we got more and more variety in requested product data," says Veldhuizen. Data that was recorded internally in different places in different files. "For example, the label data was in file X, the commercial content was in file Y, and the logistics data was in another Excel file. That made it increasingly difficult to manage, especially if a change had to be made in all those files."

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Structuring data management

Before data management became unmanageable, Veldhuizen decided to look for a PIM system. "We had to start managing product information. It had to be used as well and efficiently as possible. By our customers, but also internally, data had to be able to be found quickly and carefully managed and enriched." In that quest, the fastener manufacturer approached three parties including Innovadis. "We got a nice demo of great systems from all three, but we didn't really understand what we needed now. We lacked the knowledge for that."

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Strategic partner

Implementing a PIM system was a strategic choice for Hoenderdaal Fasteners. "So we were not only looking for a good system, but also for a strategic partner to enter into a long-term and intensive cooperation. So there had to be a good feeling with the way of working. The down-to-earth and practical nature of the people at Innovadis gave us a good feeling. In addition, they had experience and knowledge of our market. That combination made us choose Innovadis."

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Future-oriented system

The PIM system that Innovadis implemented with Hoenderdaal Fasteners is the "single source of truth" in terms of product information. Van Dijk: "That means it is the only source from which product data is shared." Veldhuizen adds: "In terms of master data, we first enter new products into our ERP system, which is linked to the PIM system with an interface. Then we enrich this data in PIM. From there we unlock the data to, for example, EZ-base or our own website." With the big advantage that a change or addition of data only has to be done in the PIM system. "That saves a lot of work and reduces the margin of error," says Veldhuizen, who sees it as the ultimate future vision that a change in the PIM system will be communicated in real time to data pools and customers. "Our modular system offers that option; it's really future-proof."

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Serious attention

While the PIM system offers many benefits and promotes efficient work, it is not a matter of filling it once and then sitting back. "Data management is a full-fledged task for which you must have or create space within your team. With us, a data specialist is working full-time to maintain our data. Without this structural attention, things don't work out," warns Veldhuizen. An importance that Innovadis has stressed from the beginning. "Systems like this are a hefty investment and companies don't make them lightly. But not always a customer realizes that it is a long process before you have a PIM system fully set up and benefit from it," Van Dijk says.

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Good foundation

Together with a team from Hoenderdaal Fasteners, Innovadis' specialists therefore started at the basics. "The most important thing is a good foundation. To this end, we worked out a good tree structure at product group level together in several workshops, and from there we went on to set up, fill and classify the PIM. That classification of the data is very important," says Van Dijk.

According to Veldhuizen, the limited flexibility within that tree structure was not always easy. "You want to look at your assortment as flexibly and broadly as possible and it is sometimes difficult to fit products very tightly into the tree structure, but by thinking about this carefully and working consistently with the same classification, the quality of your data and the creation of new article data is monkey-proof. This allows us to provide our customers and data pools with the good and consistent data quality they demand."

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"The down-to-earth and practical nature of the people at Innovadis gave us a good feeling." - Bart Veldhuizen

New webshop

After using the PIM system mainly internally in recent years, Hoenderdaal Fasteners has also been making visible use of it externally since April. "Together with Innovadis, we have launched our new webshop, which is fully linked to the PIM system with its product information. With great success, because in six months we are now already doing 13% of our total sales through our web portal, and we didn't quite expect that."

"Our major customers work with an EDI link that brings orders directly from their system into our system. But even those customers sometimes order through the web shop. Because of the ease of ordering, it turns out. The webshop is filled with our 10,000 different stock items, but the smart filters always take you to the right item in three steps. At a detailed level, you get a lot of information about the article, and after logging in, customers see their own purchase prices and our stock. With our PIM system as the engine, the webshop offers our customers a lot of practical information ", says Veldhuizen.

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Data warehouse

Internally, the Web shop is also widely used. "For example, our inside sales staff can quickly look up products or product info when they have customers on the phone." According to Van Dijk, the internal target group is often forgotten by companies looking for a PIM system. "First priority is often the external stakeholder, the customer or supplier. But a PIM system also offers the internal organization many advantages. Like the process optimization here at Hoenderdaal Fasteners. Everyone benefits from a central system containing quick access to all relevant product information." \

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Differentiate with content

Veldhuizen is convinced that content will only become more important in the relationship between supplier and wholesaler. "In the market for suppliers of building materials and hardware, you see increasingly large conglomerates emerging as a result of takeovers. This consolidation is causing less and less price differentiation. But with your content, as a manufacturer you can differentiate to whom you provide access to this and in doing so you offer loyal and important customers better data so they have a competitive advantage."

Partly for this reason, Hoenderdaal Fasteners also always provides additional mood images, videos or shelf materials. "If a customer wants to pay attention to fasteners in general in his webshop or on the store floor, he is happy with our materials and content. In doing so, we really help our customer and that is the essence for us. After all, our customers' success is also our success."

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