BINDER shares high-quality and rich product content to support its global market

The absence of a centralized repository meant data management was redundant, error-prone, time- consuming, and costly. In addition, the lack of a single source of product information meant translation management was also affected. It was a tedious and extensive process that prevented BINDER from publishing to additional languages.

These inefficiencies prompted Binder to seek a solution that could support their need for centralized management of product information, automation, the optimization of processes, and robust translation management. The company wanted to ensure the process remained transparent, using data from a single source to ensure international product communication was flexible, group-oriented, and fast.

• Establish a transparent depiction of workflows
• Maintain high product visibility to all products in case of discontinuation, etc.
• Enable a simple translation process
• Present a significant cost reduction and accelerate time-to-market
• Deliver quick results and provide an output nine months after project start

BINDER chose Contentserv PIM, considering it critical for the standardized maintenance, management, and distribution of all product data, including translations across all channels. Additionally, BINDER chose Contentserv DAM to manage more than 2,500 digital assets (images, videos, documents, etc.).

Contentserv’s Translation Manager enabled BINDER to facilitate translation requests for publications in several languages without delay. Completed translations were then automatically assigned to the right products managed centrally through PIM. The PIM solution was also seamlessly integrated with the Trados Language Server.

An essential part of the implementation was establishing workflows for different users, employees and external service providers. Contentserv’s Workflow Management effectively supplied the functionality that allowed BINDER to track the progress and status of tasks regarding ongoing projects.

The Contentserv PIM solution provides great flexibility in data generation, with users managing an impressive amount of data (2,400,000 attributes, 24,000 references, and 172,000 ean/UPC barcodes). Export procedures integrated into the solution speed up the automatic creation and editing of catalogs and web pages, allowing Lacoste to export up to 40,000 items daily. Users can then assemble images, technical attributes, and prices by simply dragging and dropping them onto dynamic models subject to pre-established rules.

Other significant advances include the ease of creating new attributes such as information that allows consumers to refine their choices and maximize their shopping experience. This process used to take several months and now takes only 2 or 3 weeks. Furthermore, as fashion is governed by seasons, it is necessary to reconfigure entire offerings every six months. The Contentserv PIM solution allows Lacoste to maintain the attributes (about 300 per product) of the models that remain on sale, and thus, avoids rebuilding the catalog from scratch.

However, with a fast-moving ready-to-wear market, the colossal manual entry of different product data (6,000 color references per season, assortment tracking, product feature updates in different languages, etc.) became extremely challenging. Furthermore, primarily using spreadsheets for this purpose was very time-consuming and error-prone. These files quickly became archaic in the context of Lacoste’s digital transformation and they would often contain numerous data entry errors, which resulted in a slow time-to-market that was harmful to sales. Another major challenge involved variable data such as collections, which must be renewed every six months and had to take into account the difference between the Northern and Southern hemispheres.

Therefore Lacoste needed to adopt a tool that would streamline the creation and distribution of its product catalogs on both its merchant and marketplace sites. This made it clear that Product Information Management (PIM) was the right solution to quickly enrich databases, accurately aggregate content, and shorten time-to-market, all while increasing agility and flexibility.