Gust. Alberts and crossbase - technology that delivers what it promises

The company Gust. Alberts GmbH & Co. KG, GAH for short, is a leading manufacturer of home and garden products with a long tradition, now in its fourth generation. Headquartered in the Sauerland region of Germany, the company is represented by four sales companies in Europe and Russia. The product range includes fittings, profiles, sheet metal and fencing technology. Its more than 8,000 international trading partners include DIY stores, specialist retailers and online retailers.

A customized PIM and cross-media solution was implemented for GAH based on the crossbase standard software. Over 7,000 articles, including product structure, prices and features, are continuously synchronized per article via the bidirectional SAP PIM interface; the article creation itself takes place in the PIM. The so-called product, which groups article variants with the same form, plays an important role in marketing-specific communication. A lot of product information is maintained on the product and passed on to the articles.

The integrated image database is used to manage product photos, assembly photos, symbols and stock photos, and the graphics converter and Illustrator module are used to automatically generate additional image formats. Enumeration texts are automatically generated from reusable document modules and features. The translation takes place in the countries on the basis of Excel files. A function can be used to determine the layout context for each translation.

In order to be able to use products in the printed catalogs and in electronic catalogs, these are referenced in marketing-specific product views for the corresponding sales channels. The aim is to automatically produce the five product group-specific main catalogs in 10 language/country combinations and 1,500 pages. Special features include anchored objects to control the position of images and texts on the left and right-hand side in the flow frame layout as well as a special grouping function in the product tables. For trading partners, the data is provided in BMEcat or Excel format and the required image files. Internally, sales staff, for example, can have read access to all product information. The API server enables IT to retrieve data from the PIM and use it for internal purposes.

A structure was developed to create the search bars for the web info portal. Products can thus be sorted based on the product characteristics available in crossbase (dimensions, color, material, etc.).