Case study - Tractel

Project Summary

Tractel is a world leading manufacturer of height safety equipment. A product range with over 36,000 SKUs is sold in 15 different languages via a distributed global team. The organisation requires a PIM system with complex data modelling capabilities to be integrated with various business systems and frontend customer facing channels for multi-lingual, multi-currency sales and product information distribution.

Services:

PIM
Ecommerce
Web Development
Data Management
Systems Integration

The Challenge

A global business with local needs.

Globally Minded

Tractel are a distributed team with offices globally. Their systems need to connect and allow for changes in multiple languages across different brands.

Regional differences

Local sales teams must be able to apply differences for compliancy on a country level and be able to serve product data in common formats for their region.

Complex product data

With a wide ranging product set, there are over 300 attributes to manage across 36,000 SKUs, with product variants, bundles and configurators of varying complexity.

Research & Discovery

A project the size and complexity of this should always start with research and discovery. In fact, we’ve run many discovery sessions with Tractel over the years we’ve been working with them. When given a new challenge to work on, we will first look to understand the reason behind the work. What are the business objectives and what does the long term success look like?

Stakeholder Workshops

Stakeholder workshops bring together everyone within the business involved in making the project a success. We dive into project goals, current business restrictions and look for opportunities to improve the desired outcomes.

Process Journey Mapping

For a recent project that we knew would require some digital transformation work, we identified all related processes in the business and mapped out how those might need to change to complement the new feature requirements.

Data Analysis

We look at data from different sources. Web traffic, sales data and product information all form part of our discovery work so we can ensure we really understand the business and inform ongoing strategy.

User Experience & User Interface

User Experience Design for Tractel is an ongoing effort. There are many facets to the organisations user facing channels and these must be iteratively worked on so they evolve with the business. We are, over time building a design system that can be applied efficiently and effectively wherever needed for consistent and coherent experience for all users.

User Journey Mapping

User journey mapping allows us to create desired paths we’d like customers to take whilst exploring Tractel’s products.

Wireframing

Every project we do for Tractel goes through a wireframing stage so we can accurately assess the feature requirements on a page by page basis.

UI Design

The User Interface design for Tractel uses a strong, on-brand colour palette and provides a functional navigation experience.

Data Management

Product data is at the core of everything we do for Tractel. It must integrate with business systems such as ERP and Shipping management and be manipulated in multiple ways for display in print and digital. Alongside PIM, customer and order records merge to assist in multi-national product sales.

30,000 SKU’s managed

Thousands of products are managed across multiple brands and product ranges through Tractel’s PIM system.

Complex product data modelling

There are over 300 attributes available for products serving multiple ranges. Product variants, bundles, and configurators are all manageable by admin.

Managing regional differences

Rules for number and unit formating differ between countries. We’ve made it possible for product managers to work with Imperial or metric systems and manage the difference between European and UK number formatting.

Systems Integrations

For large organisations it’s critical that certain business systems talk to each other. Our developers are highly skilled with backend integration work and solved several difficult tasks getting older systems to connect with modern day API’s.

Avalara Tax Management

Avalara Tax is a SaaS solution designed to easily navigate the complex tax system in the United States.

ShipperHQ

ShipperHQ provides live shipping rates during checkout. It makes shipping calculations simple and provides costs savings through efficient courier management.

ERP Integration

An ERP is the heart of a business like Tractel. We’ve implemented 24 hour syncing between systems for product and customer record updates.

The Final Result

Like any project of this nature, the result is an ever-evolving platform. Product managers are able to update their ranges cross borders in multiple formats and languages. Customers are able to access product information in more ways than ever before. And Tractel have better visibility of their products.