Sterling effort: Electrical connectors company progresses from e-catalog to e-commerce excellence
Malcolm Wheatley, senior contributing editor (malcolm_wheatley@compuserve.com) -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 12/2/2008 11:24:00 AM
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For electrical connector manufacturer FCI, a new Web portal powered by Sterling Commerce’s Sterling Multi-Channel Selling offering give Versailles, France-based FCI a powerful e-catalog/e-commerce combination.
Customers and partners can find, configure, and order the products and services they require while determining the best price, reviewing specifications, and sourcing associated technical information. FCI rolled out English, Chinese, and Japanese language versions of the site, and plans to offer additional languages in the future.
By giving customers technical support and information on the 94,000 connector types sold by FCI, the site gets a million hits per month from 145 countries worldwide. It is soon expected to generate significant revenues as well, when an e-commerce capability is fully rolled out before the end of 2008.
With sales of [euro] 1.3 billion and operations in 30 countries, 14,000-employee FCI is no minnow. But executives are surprised—and gratified—at the success of the site. It has quickly become a significant part of FCI's business, reports Applications Director Frédéric Lutard.
“It’s a business tool,” he says. “Customers and prospects can quickly and easily find and research products on our Web site, enabling us to enhance the customer experience and increase customer satisfaction.”
Yet, it turns out, FCI came relatively recently to e-commerce, and did so partly at the prompting of a new shareholder—a U.S.-based private equity fund that took a stake in the business.
The story starts in 2006, relates Lutard. FCI had a basic online catalog, but it lacked any e-commerce capability. It functioned, in effect, as a technical reference library and product selection tool. Furthermore, the software package that had created the e-catalog was no longer supported.
It was time for a fresh start. The vision: to create a repository of high-quality information that could—if the customer wished—be used as the basis of a purchase transaction. EDI was to remain the core electronic route through which FCI anticipated receiving orders electronically, with the Web site delivering e-commerce capabilities for customers who did not already have an EDI-based trading relationship with FCI.
Lutard began researching the marketplace in June 2006.
“We knew we would ultimately need to address at least 100,000 products, and we weren’t sure that two potential vendors could cope,” explains Lutard. That left one vendor remaining: Comergent Technologies, shortly to be acquired by Sterling Commerce. Technically “very robust,” says Lutard, the Comergent catalog offering had a proven ability to deal with large volumes of items. It also was strongly focused on e-commerce.
Phase One of the project began in November 2006, surrounding the e-catalog aspect. Although the objective was to create an e-catalog with data quality that was of the highest standard, explains Lutard, the barriers to achieving this weren’t insignificant.
Some of the required information was maintained in the FCI’s QAD MFG/PRO ERP system, while other data came from pricing systems. Even more data came from user-maintained Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. While it was recognized that a product data management (PDM) system would have been a more appropriate source—and a PDM implementation was under way—the e-catalog project was deemed too important to wait for this to be completed.
| “Customers and prospects can quickly and easily find and research products on our Web site, enabling us to enhance the customer experience and increase customer satisfaction.” —Frédéric Lutard, applications director, FCI |
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In parallel, too, FCI wanted to harmonize the way data was presented to improve its searchability. Specifically, feature values were one aspect of the e-catalog project where harmonization was needed. Lutard cites the use of English Imperial and metric sizes (inches and millimeters) as one example of this. The problem was solved by assigning the task to a data cleansing group in India, which still remains the gatekeeper of data quality by connecting with product managers and others to act as one single repository of clean product data.
With the e-catalog project live May 2007, it was time to begin work on Phase Two: adding e-commerce capabilities. While this phase formally began in February 2008, planning and preparation began several months earlier. One obvious complication, for example, was the fact that it was necessary to treat different customers in different ways. FCI makes custom connectors for some of its customers, and while these should be available online for those customers to purchase, it was important to ensure that they couldn’t be purchased by unintended parties.
Phase Two has been live on a limited pilot basis since mid-August. Some 40 customers and 20 worldwide sales representatives access the e-commerce capabilities, and offer feedback on specific features that could improve the process.
As with the first phase, says Lutard, the project hasn’t been without its challenges—most of which revolve around back-end integration. FCI’s MFG/Pro system runs in some 25 instances, spread over two data centers. Oracle service-oriented architecture has been used to manage real-time connectivity between these back-end systems, and the Sterling Multi-Channel Selling e-catalog and e-commerce offering—itself spread over a Windows server and an Oracle database running under Linux.
“FCI is a great example of how Sterling Multi Channel Selling works well across an international business,” concludes Ronald Teijken, European industry executive for manufacturing operations at Sterling Commerce. “Making the e-catalog simpler to use for the distributors, procurement managers and engineers will in turn encourage repeat business in what is undoubtedly a highly competitive market segment.”
