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 closely with Alfa Laval in an agile process throughout the entire implementation and rollout, ensuring seamless collaboration between business and IT teams.
The PIM solution is built on Microsoft Azure, consolidating and digitizing industrial product knowledge to enhance the digital customer journey.
By leveraging Microsoft Azure to manage bottlenecks in data workflows handling millions of data elements, the solution can scale efficiently and optimize outgoing channels with minimal system dependencies. This enables a flexible product data model that delivers market-specific and localized datasets, ensuring a truly tailored product experience for customers.
The Azure-based scalability guarantees stable business operations and allows Alfa Laval to expand product data services via APIs, integrating with various business applications without additional maintenance costs.
The inriver application is supplemented with Cosmos DB and a geo-redundant storage account, ensuring scalable and global accessibility.
By utilizing Function Apps and Event Grid Topics, both internal and external data consumers receive real-time notifications about critical data updates.
The storage account and Cosmos DB support both B2B and B2C e-commerce platforms, along with multiple internal applications.
Data access is managed through API Management, with requests authorized via Active Directory, ensuring secure and structured data governance.
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.
