Mastering data management

With its business growing larger and its sales channels diversifying, Corporate Express, the $4.5 billion B2B provider of office and computer products and services, needed a better way to maintain and manage its product data. "We were running an Oracle database, storing product information used for our private marketplace," says Chuck Coleman, director, product support systems for Corporate Express. "We were using an Access front end to manipulate data, perform updates and load data, and doing a weekly extract and pushing that into the marketplace for the week." Other data came from Excel spreadsheets.

But proliferating sales channels was making that approach to product data management untenable. "It became pretty evident that we needed to move data quicker and more consistently," says Coleman. A number of customers were using third-party marketplaces requiring electronic catalogs, which IT was producing on a one-off basis. "It was a tedious, manual process," Coleman recalls. "It was tough from a quality assurance standpoint to put out consistent information. We had a backlog of 250 of these catalogs." Corporate Express was also re-launching its marketplace and needed a better way to maintain product data.

A Diamond in the Rough

Products in the product information management (PIM) market were just emerging in 2000, so it was tough to find capabilities that Corporate Express was seeking in a product. Then Coleman came across Trigo Technologies, then a PIM middleware company and now part of IBM's WebSphere Product Center. Trigo was delivering its software via the application service provider model. The product, a form of master data management, fit the company's parameters, including speed and flexibility, and passed muster with Corporate Express' IT staff.

After some delays caused by a reworking of the company's marketplace, the application was customized and deployed in 90 days. In March, 2002, the product was moved to Corporate Express' side of the firewall and installed on Solaris. In 2004, just as Trigo was being acquired by IBM, the company ported to a Linux platform and saw a four-fold increase in processing speed.

Organization at its Core

In addition to providing one view of product data for corporate and customer use, Product Center enabled the company to add a number of new features to its marketplaces, including the ability to flag items with longer lead times and provide appropriate messaging to the user, offer a product accessory finder function, and support material safety and data sheets, tracking URLs through Product Center. "We made a number of e-commerce changes that at one point would have been code-based," says Coleman. "Now they're readily handled by Product Center."

Today, Corporate Express maintains 350,000 SKUs in WebSphere Product Center, 230,000 of them active. The others (discontinued or unsupported items) are maintained to minimize the work required if they're reactivated. As anticipated, Corporate Express' sales channels are now quite diverse. Product Center supports close to 300 third-party marketplaces, a number of Web-based marketing organizations, an array of paper catalogs, 35 monthly flyers, a data warehouse for reporting and partners' e-commerce sites.

In February, 2006, the company went live with IBM's WebSphere Product Center v5.2. Among the benefits Coleman sees are enhanced audit capabilities. "It gives us consistency and the ability to spot different data points," he says. The company is also implementing a solution from Silver Creek Systems to enhance its authoring capabilities and deploy workflow features.

The Power of Product Information

In the second half of 2006, Corporate Express will begin to feed product data directly into its Oracle ERP system. "In the past we had two groups to manage that," says Coleman, one for Product Center and one for a legacy system. Corporate Express will leverage Product Center in the future to streamline its ability to get product data from its 1,500 to 1,800 suppliers.

With PIM, Corporate Express has been able to add 100,000 additional products and double the number of product attributes, with about the same size staff. Having one view of product and customer information had helped reduce the time required to introduce new products by 13 weeks and significantly grow the percentage of business generated through e-commerce.

"It's been very good for us," says Coleman. "It's definitely something that works very well for Corporate Express."