Overview
Old World Industries (OWI), an automotive chemical manufacturer, is a multi-brand operation with names such as PEAKauto and BlueDEF. They sell to consumers on retail shelves as well as to commercial and industrial businesses, with product content across the web on dozens of distribution channels. Operating under a little-known corporate brand umbrella, OWI was facing challenges:
- Product data updates were manual and labor-intensive
- Siloed and dated brand websites were built on a variety of technologies and didn’t serve their vast customer base (consumers, distributors, fleets, retailers)
- With so many platforms and manual processes, there wasn’t one central and accurate location to manage product data and web content
Solutions
Shift7 technology and strategy teams assessed the state of product information at OWI, documented current challenges, learned auto industry standards like ACES and PIES, and identified the best way to modernize OWI’s processes through PIM. In a Product Content Digitization project, the solution included:
- Assessing four PIM technologies in a detailed RFP, ultimately choosing inriver as the best fit for OWI’s requirements
- Executing a phased PIM rollout, established a data model for products and parts, and connected inbound integrations from SAP ERP
- Integrating with Syndigo, we added six initial outbound syndications including AutoZone, Advance Auto Parts, NAPA, Pep Boys, and Amazon, with many more added
In addition, Shift7 design, strategy, and technology teams did customer research, designed and built a best-in-class web experience for OWI’s many personas and brands, using the power of the Bloomreach Digital Experience platform. In a Site Design & Build project, the Shift7 solution included:
- Conducting customer research and competitive assessment, creating guiding principals, personas, and benchmarks for the future site experience
- A site information architecture that addresses the complexity of serving both retail and commercial audience personas, having dedicated sites for an extensible family of brands and international locales
- Bloomreach Content powering the newly designed site experience, built on reusable components
- Bloomreach Discovery delivering rich search experiences and powers dedicated listings for various content types.
- Integrations with inriver PIM, TransPerfect, and other applications within OWI such as Store Locator and Explore by Vehicle functionality using Opticat APIs
- Delivering digital insights that optimize conversions through an analytics foundation
Platforms
- inriver PIM
- Bloomreach Discovery
- Bloomreach Content
- Bloomreach Cloud
Impact
- With one system of record for product information, OWI’s data quality significantly increased across dozens of channels across the web
- The OWI corporate brand is elevated, with well known brands like PEAKauto and BlueDEF maintaining their own brand presence with a modern, easy-to use-design that maintains relevance for a vast customer base
- Significantly improved discovery experiences for customers, including more intuitive search, richer filtering, and many unique content types like whitepapers, case studies, news articles, videos, and events
- New extensible brand hierarchy allows OWI to surface results across its family of brands, giving users frequent visibility to breadth of offering
- Bloomreach Cloud solution for hosting has made frequent agile deployments manageable
- Analytics foundation allows OWI to measure success, continually optimize the experience, and drive conversions
Syndications enabled from one central PIM
5 brand sites launched in phase 1
Increase in use of key “Explore by Vehicle” feature
