OASE and crossbase - seamless provision of information

Founded in 1949 and headquartered in Hörstel, OASE GmbH is the market leader for garden pumps and pond technology. The product range includes pond pumps, filters, streams and lighting.It is used for water features, water spouts, garden ponds and swimming ponds - both in domestic gardens and for large-scale installations in public areas. The company is represented worldwide with over 20 languages, several brands and eleven subsidiaries in Europe, Asia and the USA.

A customized PIM and cross-media solution was implemented for OASE based on the crossbase standard software. Approximately 5,000 articles including product structure, prices and around 90 features per article are continuously imported via the XML interface from SAP to the PIM or maintained in crossbase by product managers. The so-called product family, which groups items of the same type, plays an important role in marketing-specific communication. A lot of product information is maintained in the product family and passed on to the articles.

The integrated image database enables the management of product photos, application photos, icons, graphics, drawings and diagrams. The graphics converter automatically generates additional image formats.

In order to minimize the effort for text maintenance, including translations, enumeration texts are automatically generated from reusable document modules. A special feature is the use of validity control for texts and articles in product ranges.

The translation is carried out by the service provider on the basis of the TMS interface to Trados. In order to be able to use articles as standard articles in the printed catalogs, on the websites or in the online catalogs for specific brands, countries and target groups, the product families are referenced in marketing-specific product views for the corresponding sales channels. The aim is to automatically produce the seven country-language combinations of the main catalog with over 250 pages, which are published annually and consist of product pages with a modular structure and editorial pages with a free layout. For the online media (website, media portal), the data is provided in a coordinated API format and the required image files. Similarly, the data is provided in Excel format for trading partners.