About JEOL

Founded in 1949, JEOL is a long-established manufacturer of Electron Microscopes that expanded its business over the past 70 years to include analytical, medical, and industrial equipment and instrumentation for high-end scientific and industrial research and development. The company has also been a pioneer in offering a sales and customer service system with an eye on the global market. Today many of its products are used worldwide, earning it a strong reputation as an international company.

The challenge

JEOL planned to improve customer satisfaction by rebuilding its after-sales service system, which served as a basis for various customer services. This system has been operating for over 20 years and was developed back then based on the now obsolete development language ASP. Because of this, it could not run on newer operating systems and was reaching the limits of its expansibility. In addition, since the system was not designed for data analysis in service operations, various indicators had to be calculated manually. The company wanted to automate these tasks as much as possible and create a system that could quickly respond to changes in its environment.

JEOL’s product range comprises approximately 40,000 items and some of the digital assets and technical information used to be managed by individual employees. If they wanted to create a general catalog, for example, they had to bring together all relevant employees from all departments and painstakingly merge the respective information. The company needed a solution that could centrally manage the information required for service and technical support. JEOL realized that integrated solutions such as Product Information Management (PIM) and Digital Asset Management (DAM) were needed to address the challenges the growing company faced.

Requirements

JEOL sought a centralized solution to manage product data and distribute it across all channels. The solution must be able to support the following:

• Transparent management of data – from onboarding to publication
• Distribute accurate, relevant, and consistent information to eCommerce sites and electronic catalogs to improve customer satisfaction
• Integration of PIM and DAM into the existing system landscape
• Enable batch updates of approximately 40,000 items, greatly improving operational efficiency
• Quick, one-click search for the latest information on each item
• Manage information on collected parts in line with the ERP, including sales prices, image files, and text descriptions
• Allow employees and partners to access product information easily and safely

Implementation

JEOL chose Contentserv as the new foundation for product information management and its implementation partner Exa took over project implementation. The solution’s comprehensive range of functions, flexibility, and scalability tipped the scales. Being able to manage product content as well as the referring digital assets in one central system was key to JEOL’s decision. JEOL's goal was to collate and manage previously scattered information centrally to improve operations and reduce manual effort.

The project began in January 2020, and although there were some delays due to the pandemic, it progressed significantly when Exa started the construction phase in November. Exa solved technical obstacles regarding the centralization of dispersed product information and the integration with eCommerce sites. As the core of the company's new after-sales service system, Contentserv was used to enrich the data obtained from the ERP system, centralize the management of technical information, and distribute it to eCommerce sites and service systems.

The most challenging part was defining an effective data model. Since it was being developed in parallel with the creation of related systems, such as the call center system, field service system, CMS, and eCommerce site, it was repeatedly reviewed and adjusted until shortly before the new system went into operation.

Contentserv’s advanced data tools were particularly helpful during the data integration. Its dashboard was used to identify missing data elements and the enriched content helped support ecommerce operations. Strong workflow capabilities enabled JEOL to identify critical data issues, recommend and prioritize them, and eliminate manual maintenance processes.

Results that matter

The comprehensive PIM and DAM capabilities of Contentserv allowed JEOL to establish an always up-to-date, media-neutral central repository for its product information and digital assets. As a result, JEOL can ensure consistent, high-quality product information for any channel and highly automate the production of marketing media and product datasheets, significantly improving operational efficiency. Thanks to workflow automation, the amount of manual labor is massively reduced and the information supply chain is positively impacted.

JEOL also renewed its after-sales service system on the basis of Contentserv's PIM and DAM. All data is now managed in a single source of truth and the latest information can be obtained easily and reliably. If prices need to be adapted, or mistakes need to be corrected, this can be easily carried out in one place, greatly reducing redundant manual efforts. Multilingual catalogs are now produced quickly and easily, saving a lot of time and resources.

Looking ahead, JEOL seeks to effectively share technical information on a global scale and distribute even larger quantities of enriched product content to other channels and markets with the support of Contentserv. One example is the digitization of the company’s general catalogs, which were previously delivered in paper form.