Are sluggish IT systems holding back growth?
Matas wanted to expand its product catalog and scale the business, but distributing product information turned out to be a real sore spot. A new PIM system became the lotion that softened up inflexible product enrichment. Today, the solution is an integrated part of the digital strategy — ensuring that Matas not only has stripes on its products, but also racing stripes on its growth.
Challenge
At Matas, there was a clear ambition to improve the distribution of product information. It was difficult to gain an overview of whether the assortment contained all the required information, including images, documents, and other relevant media.
Before reaching out to Vertica, Matas also experienced that changes in the ERP system could take up to 24 hours before being reflected in downstream applications such as the webshop on matas.dk. This resulted in a long time to market for all changes made in the ERP system.
A more efficient product enrichment process became a key initiative to enable both current and future strategic goals at Matas.
With the right setup, the purchasing department would be able to create new products, which would immediately be flagged as ready for product enrichment.
By automating the enrichment process, Matas would not only shorten the time to market but also quickly and effectively expand existing assortments and gain visibility into requirements for products in new markets.
In addition, it was difficult to maintain a complete overview of the product assortment.
The process
The collaboration between Matas and Vertica began with a series of workshops, where solution design and the core areas of the implementation task were clarified.
Efforts were prioritized, and a phased roadmap was created. Each feature, process, and integration was analyzed in relation to Matas’ internal development areas.
For Vertica, it was essential to address the most critical business challenges. Based on our experience with Product Information Management (PIM) and ecommerce projects, we know that this discovery phase ensures the solution aligns with business goals and establishes agreement on the project scope.
Following this initial phase, we held technical workshops with specialists from both Matas and Vertica. These sessions covered security policies, integrations, data requirements for deliveries, and more.
Solution
The project’s primary goal was to migrate market-ready product data from the ERP and CMS systems into an inRiver PIM system. inRiver’s modules, along with its support for multi-language data, attributes, and fields, enable an efficient workflow for new markets—all in line with Matas’ growth plans.
User-friendliness is a top priority, and with the built-in functionalities, the inRiver solution has automated time-consuming processes, eliminating the need for duplicate data maintenance.
System users have full control over how products are presented across sales channels. The solution is dynamic, allowing marketing employees to quickly, easily, and efficiently update the entire assortment, ensuring it is fully optimised for special events such as Black Friday.
In this way, the solution acts as a growth accelerator, supporting Matas’ ambitious plan to expand from approximately 35,000 of stock keeping units to five to ten times that number.
Result
Marketing-related product data and media have been migrated to the PIM system, making them fully market-ready, including product descriptions, certifications, labels, and filtering data.
Matas now has complete visibility over its system landscape. The solution allows them to see, in a clear and intuitive way, how market-oriented data flows seamlessly through the system architecture. The streamlined enrichment process has increased transparency and overview of product data, while impurities and poor data quality have been cleaned up in the new system.
Each category manager now has full oversight of their assortment and can use inRiver’s built-in tools to focus on the products that deliver the most value. This efficiency has reduced errors and minimized repetitive procedures in the enrichment process.
The technical integration solution also ensures that changes and updates to product data are reflected in near real-time within minutes.
The next steps include enabling automatic onboarding of supplier data via a supplier portal and integrating data from a new ERP system. All upcoming initiatives will support expansion into new markets as part of Matas’ ambitious growth plan.
