Blog
November 21, 2022
With over 900 employees, the family-owned company hostettler, founded in 1906, is a globally successful general importer of bicycles, motorcycles, automobiles, and everything related to them. As a key economic driver in Central Switzerland, the hostettler group is particularly well known as an importer of Yamaha motorcycles and as a manufacturer of Wheeler and BiXS bicycles.
However, the company’s highly successful expansion over many years and the associated development and opening up of new sales channels placed growing demands on the IT infrastructure. In addition to the growing demands on the infrastructure, issues such as e-commerce alongside brick-and-mortar retail became increasingly important. Modern data management was therefore at the heart of this new IT infrastructure.
Automation of core processes for successful digital transformation
In order to enable modern data management, hostettler decided to renew its IT system landscape and automate key processes in a targeted manner. This included the introduction of the PIM system from Contentserv, which acts as a single source of truth for product data. This is the only way to ensure that all product information is available in one place. In addition, products can be made available on various channels in a targeted manner.
Another relevant point in favor of introducing a modern PIM system was that it also provided the additional option of quickly and automatically onboarding product data from various product data sources, including both internal catalog systems and external supplier and manufacturer catalogs.
Before the introduction of the Onedot product data platform, all products had to be prepared manually in the ERP and PIM systems. This meant that hostettler employees had to invest a lot of time assigning the right product information to the products, filling in the right attributes, or providing image material for the desired products. This is one of the reasons why the hostettler group set itself the goal of significantly increasing the degree of automation of this process in the ERP and PIM systems, thereby investing in better product data quality at the same time. This allows the same data team at hostettler to accomplish much more. After all, only those who can offer products quickly and in the desired e-commerce quality will succeed in the market.
Fast time-to-market and high product data quality thanks to Onedot
Following the implementation of Onedot’s clearly structured AI-supported onboarding process, which includes key steps such as automated product categorization and mapping supplier attributes to hostettler attributes, manual effort has been significantly reduced. Today, items can be classified, products can be matched, and attribute values and units can be automatically standardized and transferred to hostettler’s desired target format. This means that this automated process not only significantly reduces manual effort during initial creation, but also greatly improves the enrichment of product data in the PIM system.
Today, hostettler has a modern, flexible, and extremely powerful IT infrastructure that manages around 275,000 products, 900,000 images, and more than half a million references in up to four languages. This allows hostettler to remain a key economic driver in Central Switzerland and to be successful in international competition.