Stibo Systems Helps Brammer Improve Data Quality and Produce Pan

Brammer plc is Europe’s leading distributor of mechanical industrial Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul (MRO) products and services, including bearings, mechanical power transmission, pneumatics, hydraulics, tools and general maintenance equipment, personal protection, health and safety and more. Across Europe, Brammer operates from over 350 sales and service centres and as a supplier of all the world’s leading brands, the company has to deal with millions of different products, and offer pan-European 24/7/365 coverage, guaranteeing quick and easy local access to stock.

Challenge
This means Brammer has a lot of information to manage: More than 3.5 million product lines, 100,000+ customers, 10,000+ suppliers, 350 locations in 16 countries, 14 National Distribution Centres and 5.7 million transactions in 2011. Just to keep up with new products, the company creates between two and three thousand new part numbers every day.

Brammer has a successful strategy of growing through organic growth as well as through local acquisitions, which has resulted in multiple ERP systems throughout the group. Brammer has worked around this challenge through integrating their ERP systems with pan- European applications via an integration layer. This has proven a practical and workable solution for many years, making it easier for employees to handle local transactions with customers and provide the levels of service their customers require in delivering the right part, at the right price and at the right time.

However, in 2012, following the launch of a major new product range of tools, general maintenance and health & safety products, it was a challenge to produce a printed catalog in multiple languages covering a vast product range in a very short timeframe. Normally this would take 6-9 months for a single country to be produced in one language – but the European catalog had to be done in just 5 months.

Solution
Brammer set forth in 2004 its vision for data governance, which included such elements as single, shared standards for data across Europe; requirements for adhering to standards; organizational change; and best practices, such as tight integration with manufacturing partners.

The company selected an MDM provider and began migrating data from legacy systems to leverage consolidated product information in a range of applications. However, as use-cases increased, it became apparent that the solution chosen lacked some functionality for managing aspects of product data. Brammer, in 2011, acquired a company using Stibo Systems’ STEP solution for PIM and saw that STEP could effectively manage the rich content necessary to feed websites like Brammer Online (Brammer’s e-commerce solution). Despite the presence of other PIMs in the Brammer IT infrastructure, Nigel Trend, Director of Business Integration, Brammer plc, says “Brammer decided to make STEP its pan-European PIM; We saw how valuable STEP was to the company we acquired, we read the positive reviews by analysts, and we were impressed by the knowledge and experience the Stibo team had in doing the exact things we needed to do.”

Up until Brammer found Stibo and STEP, the company had felt that the compromises imposed by their existing approach, was a price worth paying. All other solutions looked expensive, disruptive, and unconvincing in relation to be able to deliver on their promises.

Brammer presently has both an MDM and a PIM solution, but clearly separates functions between the two. “We use MDM for product cross-referencing, new product data creation, managing the product hierarchy and integrating with country ERPs,” says Trend. “We export rich, unstructured content on products from MDM into STEP, which we use as the content source for websites and print catalogs. Going forward, we want a single MDM plus a single PIM solution, with STEP as the standard PIM. Looking beyond that, we’re also considering standardizing on STEP for both MDM and PIM.”

Results
Improved Data Quality
Brammer created a single source of the truth with its centralized MDM and PIM solutions that enable the company to manage accurate data on millions of products.

Pan-European Perspective
By standardizing product data and creating a companywide transaction database, Brammer has created the first and only pan-European MRO product database, providing also pan-European perspective on orders and inventory.

Catalogs
STEP has allowed Brammer to generate its first pan- European catalogs in 10 different languages in less than 5 months, with consistent data for all countries, and the ability to prepare content through a centralized team.