Danfoss wanted to reduce their time-to-market for products and product information through an agile and flexible product data solution. The solution needed to integrate seamlessly with their existing e-commerce setup, be scalable to support future growth, and at the same time strengthen sales for both internal and external sales teams.
Challenge
The 90-year-old international group Danfoss today sells its products in more than 100 countries and offers e-commerce across 35 markets via its online Product Store, which carries more than 800,000 products.
With such a vast product catalogue comes an equally overwhelming amount of product information that must constantly be updated and maintained—not only for Danfoss’ e-commerce customers but also for the many resellers who distribute Danfoss products worldwide.
The challenge for Danfoss lay not only in the sheer volume of product data but also in its complexity, which they found made it difficult to identify the ideal solution. Danfoss therefore aimed to extend their existing product data solution with a system capable of handling complex data, ensuring fast and efficient distribution of information across their internal systems, and reducing the time-to-market for product data.
In parallel, Danfoss also set out to better support future growth by training their employees to run the system independently and equipping them with the tools to extend their existing commerce solution with similar flexible Composable Commerce and MACH-based enhancements.
The Process
To find the right path, Danfoss and Vertica initiated a process to clarify needs, identify the best solution, and create a roadmap for both the project and the onboarding of Danfoss employees in Composable Commerce and MACH architecture.
This included discovery and workshops aimed at exploring Danfoss’ organisation, business, and workflows to ensure a solution tailored to support them. During this phase, we built a structured understanding of Danfoss’ existing product data model in order to design a MACH-based engine capable of accelerating the current setup.
At the same time, an onboarding process was carried out to thoroughly train Danfoss employees in both MACH architecture and Composable Commerce. This ensured that Danfoss would have the internal competencies required to manage the new solution and develop extensions themselves going forward.
All of this was driven by a shared business-based assumption: that Danfoss could increase revenue from online sales by getting their products out to their network of salespeople and resellers faster.
Solution
The CaaS solution essentially functions as an engine on top of the existing product data setup, ensuring faster time-to-market for product information.
Danfoss’ new CaaS system features an interface where both internal sales teams and external customers can select which products and associated data they want to view using a product filter.
This allows both resellers and Danfoss’ own sales teams to create customised product catalogues with selected products and product data, and integrate these product feeds into their own systems.
From a business perspective, this is advantageous because users can better segment the information they need and access validated product data directly from Danfoss. As a result, sales teams and resellers spend less time searching for specific products, and resellers no longer need to follow time-consuming manual procedures to display Danfoss products on their own e-commerce sites.
At the same time, the solution establishes a single source of truth for Danfoss’ product data, ensuring that the same accurate information is distributed across the organisation and to resellers. This contributes to higher data quality and the elimination of knowledge silos.
Results
Following the collaboration between Danfoss and Vertica, Danfoss has achieved the following:
- A MACH-based CaaS solution designed with flexibility, agility, efficiency, and performance as top priorities.
- A scalable solution that Danfoss can continue to develop in the future.
- Internal training and introduction to Composable Commerce principles and MACH architecture, enabling the team to manage the solution independently and extend other parts of their commerce setup using the same approach.
- An engine built on top of their existing product data solution, allowing them to handle their massive volumes of complex product data and ensuring faster time-to-market for products and product information.
- A user interface enabling sales teams to create customised product catalogues and feeds tailored to the customers or regions they manage.
- A solution that ensures rapid disaster recovery and a strong security score, protecting Danfoss’ product data against digital threats.
- Handover and documentation of the solution for in-house ongoing management.
In short, Danfoss’ new CaaS solution now provides a product data engine that enables faster time-to-market, more efficient workflows for sales teams and resellers handling product information, and a flexible, scalable solution that can grow with the organisation.
