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AMR Alert - Friday, August 23, 2002
How BDI Attained Best Practices in Content Management
By Louis Columbus and Jim Murphy
Getting a product description, price, availability, and margin contribution all together on the same screen for a distributor’s telemarketing department is the goal of many users that rely on pick, pack, and ship operations. Often, however, channel partners need to use multiple browsers for the same distributor that they are buying from: one browser window for price and availability, and a second for a description of the product. Integrating all this presents an opportunity for content management vendors looking to the sell side for opportunities.
BDI , a distributor of electrical products, needed to give its sales representatives product and pricing comparisons in real time, all on the same screen. With line items numbering 500,000 and growing, BDI found that its taxonomy kept changing as it introduced new products, creating entirely new classifications and resulting in confusion for telemarketing personnel. Getting pricing information to align with the latest products requires a content management product that can define schema while it organizes all main attributes in a central repository.
Pricing, margin, and Stocking-Keeping Unit (SKU) velocity data are held on the International Business Systems U.S. (IBS U.S.) ASW System. As it was, BDI’s resellers had been creating their own product and price lookup screens by opening multiple browser windows for each distributor and manufacturer to cross-reference product description, price, availability, and discounts. Resellers were hit with Electronic Swivel Chair Syndrome: they had to monitor numerous browser windows to get the essential information needed to complete their purchases. Integration with the IBM AS/400-based ASW System was also critical. Meanwhile, BDI’s selection of I-Accel from FullTilt was based on the vendor’s expertise in defining central repositories with the National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA), National Association of Electrical Distributors (NAED), and their jointly owned commercial e-business, the Industry Data Exchange Association (IDEA), where the I-Accel platform is being extensively deployed.
Rather than taking on content management problems Website by Website, users are seeking ways to refine problem areas and exploit existing content, often coordinating multiple existing repositories and making them accessible to more parties--in this case, sales, service, and operations departments at the same time. Such role-based and goal-based initiatives are pushing transaction-oriented businesses toward an emphasis on how content is used rather than where it’s stored. |
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