Alfa Laval empowers the full value chain with enterprise PIM solution

Alfa Laval is one of Sweden’s leading global industrial groups and global provider of first-rate products within heat transfer, separation, and fluid handling.

With a strategic investment in an Azure-based data-architecture for product information management (PIM), Alfa Laval have successfully increased time-to-market on digital services in on-line sales. The new capability is key to the digital transformation at Alfa Laval and empowers a localized leading customer experience.

Integrated digital workflows across the entire value chain

Like many other organizations Alfa Laval was challenged by a lack of integrated services and was often depending on excel and manual workflows to support new digital service with updated product information. This very important knowledge was, in some cases, found only in the minds of individual salespeople, which is difficult to transfer to the digital customer journey. The investment in PIM has effectively streamlined the sourcing and distribution of key product information critical to the customer.

We chose a strategic investment in PIM because our challenge was that the specific knowledge about how the products are used was only documented in a mix of freestanding documents and databases. In some cases, this highly important knowledge was only in the mind of the individual salesperson, which can be difficult to transfer to the digital customer journey….

Hans Troiza Head of Online Sales, Alfa Laval

Digital excellence with value creating services

The Alfa Laval PIM solution functions as a transverse Product Marketing HUB allowing them to control the full product assortment and target their messages precisely. It sources critical product documentation and allows product management to enrich it with commercial, customer-oriented product information.

The PIM solution is backed by a strong vison of digital excellence in Online Sales and onboard users across the organization in all markets and business divisions. It ensures consistency in data throughout the entire value chain and collects all requirements for images, industry standards, marketing texts and technical documentation. This way product updates take effect quickly in the digital sales and customer channels and provides Alfa Laval with the opportunity for digital excellence with value creating services to their customers.

It requires a targeted focus to create a digital buying experience where customers, regardless of industry and location, gain the same high level of confidence in our online recommendations as they have had with our salespeople. We have now, by and large, realized that ambition.

Hans Troiza Head of Online Sales, Alfa Laval

Creating a key advantage in online sales

It has effectively enabled the creation and distribution of targeted and enriched product catalogues to a wide array of new digital sales channels, partner portals and marketplaces. This includes the ability to tailor and optimize application specific information, which is key to guiding the customer and create a key advantage in online sales.

The new data services have strengthened the position of Alfa Laval’s products in an increasingly globalized market and is vital to the digital transformation agenda.

inRiver PIM on Azure

The PIM solution builds on the Microsoft Azure Platform to gather and digitize knowledge about Alfa Laval’s industrial products to support the digital customer journey. It uses inRiver PIM on Azure (IPMC) as the core PIM application and has achieved a further ability to scale and optimize outgoing channels with little application dependency on the data workflow, using Microsoft Azure to manage typical bottlenecks in the data-workflow handling millions of data items. This has enabled a product-data model, which can deliver market-specific and localized datasets to realize a truly localized product experience for their customers.

Scalability has ensured reliability

The Azure-based scalability has ensured Alfa Laval a reliable backbone in business operations and the capabilities to extend product data-services in API’s, which integrates to variety of business application without added overhead in data-integration maintenance.

Customer case, Alfa Laval, PIM Enterprise, Screenshot

Alfa Laval has implemented the PIM system in close collaboration with Immeo as implementation partner. Immeo worked side by side with Alfa Laval in an agile process throughout the realization and roll-out, and this close collaboration and the proximity to both the business and IT was crucial to the success of the project.

Solution architecture

Illustration - Alfa Laval PIM Azure components

The inRiver application is supplemented with both a Cosmos DB and Storage Account with geo-redundancy for scalable, global access. Using Function Apps and Event Grid Topics, we notify both internal and external data consumers of important changes.

The Storage Account and Cosmos DB data supports the B2B and B2C ecommerce platforms, as well as several internal applications. Access to the data is configured via API Management and requests are authorized with the Active Directory.

Application Insights

The use of Application Insights gives us live metrics for monitoring and performance diagnostics that assists our governance workflows. The combination of the various Azure tools allows for increased flexibility and modularity when enabling new capabilities, building on the foundation of the scalable Azure architecture.