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Herby Tessadri
Sales Manager and Authorized Signatory
Automated product information and translations for print and online at HYDAC
"Thanks to crossbase, we can bring together our varied product range with all its correlations and content in one place. The data maintenance and translation process can also be systematically controlled and the data can be made available for the online channels in a market-specific manner. Thanks to the central product information management and the trusting cooperation with crossbase, all our requirements for data provision and media production were met and implemented on schedule."
Andreas Hart
Project Manager
HYDAC DIGITAL GMBH
The HYDAC Group, headquartered in Sulzbach/Saar, was founded in 1963 as a company for hydraulic accessories. Today it is an internationally active group of companies with 22 independent individual companies. HYDAC stands for hydraulics, systems and fluid engineering. The product range includes hydraulic accumulators, fluid filters, process filters, coolers, electrohydraulic control systems, industrial valves, sensors for pressure, position measurement and solenoid technology, cylinders, pumps, fastening technology, fittings and much more. A total of over 9,000 employees work at eleven production sites and 50 branches worldwide.
HYDAC International GmbH
Mechanical/electrical engineering
Contact:
Andreas Hart
Project Manager
Andreas.Hart@hydac.com
A PIM, MAM and cross-media solution with an interface to SAP was implemented for HYDAC based on the crossbase.pim standard software.
In crossbase, the items are classified in the product structure. The products can be configured in many different ways. Type codes, which are systematically recorded in a separate structure, play an important role in the typification of product variants.
The items with their master data and the product structure are continuously imported via a standard interface to the ERP system. In crossbase, the newly imported items are classified in the product structure for the more than 15 product areas. Technical features and product relationships are transferred or additionally maintained. The media elements (including photos and graphics for products and applications, drawings, operating and maintenance instructions, brochures) are managed in the integrated MAM on a product or publication basis. Documents and drawings with a database in SAP are automatically imported via the SAP interface.
Some of the documents are available in mixed languages and have country-specific validity. The texts (product description, benefit text, application text, meta description, etc.) are entered as continuous text or generated from text modules and features.
The content is translated into over 20 languages. In this context, direct connections to authoring services (Congree via API) and translation systems (COTI2) are used. In order to make the translation process as efficient as possible and guarantee the quality of the translations, the translators are not only provided with the texts to be translated, but also with various meta data, such as relation, company and subject. This provides the translators with further context-relevant information about the texts, which ensures that the content of the foreign-language texts is as close as possible to the source language, even when taking linguistic peculiarities into account.
In order to be able to use products in the printed catalogs, e-catalogs (BMEcat) and online media, marketing-specific product views and assortments are maintained for the corresponding sales channels.
The data for the online store (Magento) and the website (Typo3) is provided using a JSON/REST API with performance-optimized delta services. The online store itself was realized by the company TechDivision, with whom crossbase already has good experience from other projects. Techdivision's reference report can be viewed here: https://www.techdivision.com/referenzen/hydac. The website, which also contains a download portal with images, documents and videos from crossbase, was realized by the company mellowmessage.
The next step is the provision of data for the configurators, which were implemented by our partner Plan Software.
People from marketing, product management, media production and translation management are involved in the process.
Project procedure
Step-by-step integration of third-party systems
Once the decision had been made in favor of crossbase as the PIM system, the first step was to implement the interfaces for connecting the PIM system to the ERP system (SAP), the translation software (Across) and the authoring system (Congree) based on the standard modules of crossbase.pim.
The project presented a challenge: the implementation had to be carried out quickly despite the large company structure with 19 product areas. The time factor was solved through "ongoing onboarding". In the first step, the new solution was initially implemented as an MVP for two of the 19 product areas. The other areas were added during ongoing operations. The go-live took place within a few months of the start of the project.
Flexible provision of data for third-party systems through the API server
Individual REST API services were designed and configured for HYDAC in order to provide the desired product information in the appropriate formats for the website (TYPO3) and web store (Magento). This allows daily updated product information and associated media files to be made available in all online channels, thus providing customers with an optimal range of information for selecting suitable products. The following data is transferred from crossbase: