From chaos to content
Catalog content management solutions help Eastman Chemical, Philips Electronics, others streamline product information and access
By Steve Perlstein, Contributing Editor -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 6/1/2001 12:00:00 AM
Eastman Chemical Co. had its own on-line product catalog up and running for two years, but when the company made a commitment to global growth, its internal solution wasn't going to cut it anymore.
"We were looking for multiple language capability, and our current product was English-only," says Mike Behal, Eastman's team leader in charge of developing the company's on-line catalog. "With our globalization project underway, we realized we were going to have to completely redesign our in-house product, or purchase a new solution."
Like an increasing number of companies, Kingsport, Tenn.-based Eastman chose the latter option. In this case, the company selected San Jose, Calif.-based SAQQARA's Commerce Suite, a package of applications that enables the manufacturer of chemicals, fibers, and plastics to maintain content and generate on-line catalogs across a variety of product lines, and in multiple languages. Eastman has completed training on the new system and is targeting full implementation for late-third or early-fourth quarter 2001.
In an indication of how the market for this type of application has evolved, Behal notes that Eastman tried to find an off-the-shelf solution two years ago when it went with its custom-built system, but there was nothing available to fill the need. That recently changed, with several vendors offering Eastman the basic functionality noted in its specifications. The key to Eastman's decision to go with SAQQARA over the seven other systems it looked at was that SAQQARA's software is based on Microsoft technologies, whereas other offerings Eastman looked at used more proprietary architectures that would take longer to implement, according to Behal.
The issues facing Eastman are the same ones confronting manufacturers both large and small, in every segment. How does a company use the Internet to not only give it an on-line presence, but also to generate revenue and improve value for its customers? And, how does it present its product information—its key content—to this on-line world?
"It's like visiting a shopping mall, and walking the aisles of various stores," says David Spenhoff, a SAQQARA vice president. "In some stores, you may find nothing on the racks, while in others, you might find nondescript items with tags on them. Still, in others, you might find full product offerings that you can compare to each other."
Spenhoff's analogy points to the central function of a catalog content management solution—not simply putting content on-line, but cleansing it and organizing it in such a way that it's more useful to buyers. It's a mission that has given rise to whole crop of relatively new software vendors.
Adding value
There was a time when enterprise resources planning (ERP) system vendors—whose product suites provide core transactional and planning capabilities—were laying claim to the solution to the catalog content management issue. And the current crop of content management software vendors say some companies still feel that way about their ERP systems.
"Some companies don't need anything beyond what they have within their ERP systems, but for others, that attitude is just the postponement of the inevitable," says Spenhoff. "You can have product information in an item master and communicate some of that information to your customers, but when you add new features, how do you communicate those to your customer? More of today's buyers want to get information on the 'Net, and it needs to fully and objectively reflect what you have to offer."
The idea with catalog content management, say Spenhoff and others, is to put tools in place that organize and present content on-screen to customers in the clearest, most accurate way possible; and to be able to use customers' buying decisions to help them find related products, or to upgrade their selections. As Spenhoff puts it, "You can't buy what you can't find." Ideally, content management software helps customers find what they know they want, and offer suggestions for complementary products and upgrades—sort of like asking burger-buyers if they want to super-size their fries.
Many manufacturers have massive amounts of data stored in enterprise systems. The challenge is to pull that data out in an automated fashion, and make it useful for customers, according to Volker Smid, a vice president of San Mateo, Calif.-based Poet, another player in the catalog content management arena. "That data is not contained in ERP systems in a way that the information can be treated as rich content," Smid says. "The goal is managing specific catalog information, extracting that information, and setting it up in a way to manage content for very specific purposes."
Poet's eSupplier Port product takes thousands of items and tags them, typically by using eXtensible markup language (XML), with properties that will enable those items to pop up only when a customer wants to see them, along with special pricing, product features, and related products that the customer also wants to see. "A company might have unique relationships with a buying organization, or sometimes it is only interested in part of the content, or in special prices," Smid says.
It was Poet's flexibility and ability to deal with data from worldwide suppliers that appealed to Philips Electronics, which is in the process of implementing eSupplier Port. With thousands of elements from hundreds of suppliers going into dozens of catalogs, the Amsterdam-based electronics giant needed an efficient way to integrate that data into its workflow.
"We realized some time ago that if we were going to move into e-procurement, we needed a professional tool to manage validation of the catalogs we get from our suppliers," says Gaspar Mandejar, vice president of procurement for Philips, which currently is testing the software on-site, with plans for full implementation by June. In addition to ensuring pricing accuracy, Philips needs to verify descriptions, units of measure, currencies, and internal design rules for every catalog listing.
"We have 40,000 items, and it's impossible to go line-by-line," says Mandejar. "Under our current systems, most of the descriptions are checked by hand, so it's nearly impossible to find all the mistakes. As such, the quality of our content can be very poor." Another benefit of the Poet system implementation, says Mandejar, is that the number of people needed to validate catalog content will be decreased from 25 to two. "That's quite an efficiency," he says.
Interwoven also lays claim to a focus on the strategic benefits gained by using catalog content management tools. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based software vendor offers a suite of products that, according to Interwoven, offers seamless integration with existing ERP and database systems to enable easy conversion of content to on-line catalogs.
"The question is, how do I turn all this data into a strategic corporate asset?" says Frank Florence, an Interwoven vice president and general manager of the company's Business-to-Business Unit. "That's the key element. We needed to develop a platform for product data, making sure the data on legacy and ERP systems merged with a Web presence."
Cleansing is the key
Randy Covill, an analyst with AMR Research, a Boston-based information technology analyst firm, says that while dozens of companies offer some type of content management solution, only a handful can bring something to the table that can mean a complete solution. Covill also states that catalog content management is not as simple as it looks.
"Too often, people think content management is just a matter of putting together tools," says Covill. "Hundreds of companies do that, but the trouble with this approach is it's not what I would call commercial-strength."
The key differentiating factor, Covill contends, is the ability to cleanse and normalize the data. In other words, it's one thing for a company to be able to pull out all of its data, translate it into HTML, and put it on a Web site. It's another thing altogether to make sure that data is in some way useful to the customer and becomes a means of generating profit for the manufacturer.
"The problem is that most companies don't update their product catalogs very often. The information might be 10 or 20 years old, and may include products that aren't even made anymore," says Covill. "Usually, that's very head-down, hands-on work—very labor-intensive. An on-line catalog needs to be built in some sort of automated fashion.
"Most companies fail to consider this a problem. They assume they can hand someone a paper catalog, it will be run through a scanner and be edited, and it will go up on the Web," Covill continues. "But that's not how it works. Even after data is cleansed, someone has to update and maintain it, and there are a lot of issues there."
Among these issues, Covill adds, is determining who is legally liable for inaccurate or out-of-date information.
"Integration is a challenge in terms of the amount of data that's out there," says Poet's Smid. Part of the solution is the inherently labor-intensive process of editing data, he says, and part rests with new technologies for data integration and communication, namely XML. "XML is the standard, and the good thing about standards is that you might see different flavors of XML, but it's still something we can work with and convert."
Another complexity in understanding catalog content management is that it's closely related to other emerging application categories—specifically, with sell-side e-commerce solutions known as enterprise channel management or partner relationship management systems. Channel management vendors including Entigo, Vienna, Va.; and Chicago-based Click Commerce, may offer integration with content management functions or catalog content management features of their own. However, channel management solutions also address Web-based order management, and a host of functions that streamline interactions with channel partners, such as warranty management.
Future requirements
Of course, now that manufacturers are beginning to embrace best-in-class content management software packages as part of their e-Business strategies, software vendors must begin thinking about what constitutes the next logical step in the content management evolution. Smid sees the need for hosted catalog content management solutions to make the applications more affordable for smaller enterprises. Under traditional licensing and implementation, deployments can run into the six figures.
"The biggest threshold in the market is for the small- and medium-sized companies that want to participate in B2B, but are too small to make that investment," Smid says. "EDI [electronic data interchange] failed because only large companies could afford to make that investment. We are working on products that are designed for application service providers, to run in hosted environments via a Web browser. It would cost a few hundred dollars per month to make those services available."
For AMR analyst Covill, the secret is blending content management and knowledge management functionality. In other words, the vendors that can offer manufacturers the ability to replace many customer service calls with the proper information on-line will be the winners.
"You've got to get the content into the right hands at the right time, and not drown the customer with too much information," Covill says. "Don't deliver too many pages of content. Give the answer to a question instead."
For More Info:
Click Commerce: www.clickinteractive.com
Entigo: www.entigo.com
Interwoven: www.interwoven.com
Poet: www.poet.com
SAQQARA: www.saqqara.com
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