Product Data Management at Euronics Belgium

Their central platform solution is based on Informatica MDM – Product 360, where all product data provided by suppliers and manufacturers are stored, converted into unique data records (so-called “Golden Records”) together with relevant marketing data. This data includes standard information such as images, texts and additional product attributes, as well as target-group specific data, e.g. YouTube videos and legal information about environmental taxes.
The distinctive feature of Euronics’ PIM is that it serves as a basis (and as such as primary system) for the SAP system. The articles’ master data are transferred from the PIM system to the SAP system, from where they are handed over to subsequent ERP processes.
The hybris online shop, through which an increasing proportion of turnover is generated, is directly connected with the PIM system. Its data is updated every two hours. Furthermore, the PIM system distributes data to third-party systems that provide information to stores (POS) and exports data to Excel files that are used in-house, for instance by the sales team.

Challenges

The main challenge of this project was, probably, implementing a solution that automatically identifies unique articles provided by more than 200 suppliers and stores them in a “Golden Record”. Euronics invests a lot of time and effort into optimizing data quality. In order to minimize the effort, the system had to ensure that all necessary tasks were performed only once for a specific article, regardless of how many suppliers provided the same article. A complex manual classification of new articles, often supplied in varying quality, and their mapping to the correct Golden Record would have significantly reduced cost savings. Thus, a fully automated system was developed, which, after an import, automatically assigns, based on specific rules, articles provided by different suppliers to master articles and subsequently merges the information in the MASTER catalogue. For each supplier manual changes are possible after each step.
A further challenge was replacing, within an extremely tight timeframe, the existing ERP system, one of the core systems of the IT infrastructure, with an SAP system. Since at Euronics PIM was to be the main source for the SAP master data, appropriate interfaces and fundamental structures had to be created. The interface in place supplies the SAP system every hour with all new and updated articles and article prices in PIM. High data quality is automatically achieved through a series of complex Informatica Data Quality Rules. There are several advantages to this approach. On the one hand, data supplied by PIM can be relied upon. On the other hand, a better overview is provided within PIM about which data should be updated or improved.

Outlook

With the system in place, Euronics will be able to integrate more and more supplier data to scale both the quantity and the quality of the data – all of this without any additional costs. Experience with quality-driven exports shows that the added value provided by this approach is considerable and will indeed be an important aspect of future interface architecture.

Facts:

• 208 suppliers
• 400k unique items (Golden Records)
• approx. 1 Million supplier items
• approx. 44k Golden Records with more than one supplier
• Max. 165 suppliers per Golden Record
• 60 active users  (approx. 25 parallel)
• 40 daily exports