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Brady Corporation
While reducing the cost of product information management, Brady Corporation streamlines processes,improves data quality, increases flexibility, extends reach and moves closer to the goal of making every business an e-business and 50 percent of all transactions “e-transactions” by 2003.
Challenge:
Brady Corporation - a world leader in complete identification solutions - is a $541 million company that is growing quickly and needs help managing its product information. Brady manufactures and markets identification, safety, coated material and graphics products ranging from labels, tapes and signs to software, printers and data collection systems. Industries served include electronics, electrical, telecom, construction, warehousing and petrochemical.
With more than 150,000 SKUs, creating and updating e-Catalogs was a very resource intensive effort for Brady. The implementation of I-Accel® has resulted in Brady currently managing tens of thousands of products, but Brady expects that number to continue to grow. Additionally, the company currently works with more than 3,000 distributors that market its products around the world and I-Accel® is currently supplying product information in four languages.
At the start of the project, Brady's challenge was formidable: too much data and too little support. There are hundreds of possible attributes per product, continuous data changes, frequent additions and deletions and there was a need for mass data updates.
The system Brady was using for product information management was adequate, but could not support Brady's rapid growth. Excel spreadsheets just couldn't cut it! Data errors, lack of control, lack of security, lack of data ownership, the inability to share data across the enterprise and the complete lack of data export capability were costing Brady real money.
Brady needed a solution to these problems and needed it to interoperate with SAP and create an export file that could be imported into IBM's WebSphere Commerce. Brady is using IBM's Net.Commerce product and is migrating to WebSphere Commerce to offer a comprehensive e-commerce service to its customers.
Solution
In September 2001, Brady selected FullTilt's I-Accel® product information management software because it enabled Brady to take product data from disparate sources and standardize it using product domain expertise. Standardized product infor mation could then be enhanced, limited or extended into customized electronic catalogs in many ways such as customer, market, internal divisions or user types. Product information could then be selected and exported in virtually any format. I-Accel® also supports internationalization.
This is important considering the fact that Brady has operations in 20 countries and reaches more than 70 countries through distribution and direct marketing efforts.
I-Accel® provided a central repository for all data needed to enable online buyers to make smart, educated purchasing decisions and for Brady to present its products with a competitive selling advantage. The software provided Brady with the ability to easily present its thousands of SKUs in a consistent, competitive manner where buyers had the information they needed to make a buying decision.
Competitive Advantage
Brady evaluated many solutions, but none provided the flexibility and scalability that Brady needed for managing its product information. Brady's products are much more complex than products like clothing in a variety of sizes and colors; any one of Brady's products can have hundreds of attributes.
I-Accel® is the only solution that, in addition to the automation, normalization and rationalization of product information, includes a proprietary Product Standardization Engine™ ensuring consistent control over product representation. I-Accel® uses product family “templates” to drive adaptive learning and rules-based processing which ensures that similar products are defined consistently. There is no better way to manage product data quality, and there is no other way to provide reliable side-by-side product comparison.
By giving Brady control over the entire product information management process, I-Accel® provided Brady and its customers an environment that ensures product information quality and consistency - something that improves the bottom line for both.
The Bottom Line
"Content is an extremely valuable asset to Brady. Once we attribute a product, we want to be able to manage that data easily, and, more importantly, we want to be able to retrieve data easily. I-Accel® leveraged our legacy systems and helped us stabilize our product information and make it manageable across multiple offices and geographies,” said Wendy Schenk, Brady's e-business development manager.
After selecting FullTilt's I-Accel® solution in September 2001, Brady Corporation has streamlined traditionally error-prone, labor-intensive processes resulting in reduced costs and rapid deployment of rich, accurate and up-to-date custom catalogs.
Technologies
Brady uses IBM's Net.Commerce product and is migrating to IBM's Websphere Commerce product to display content. The company is standardized on IBM's AS/400 platform, with other IBM products such as Domino. |
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