Spandex, international game changer for sign posts and displays, is now also offering its services online. In 11 countries, customers can consult the extensive product catalog on the updated shop.spandex.com website. With Elision’s help, Spandex is offering its personalized services – for which it has long been renowned – virtually as well.
OPTIMAL USER-FRIENDLINESS
After a thorough market study, Spandex chose Elision as a strategic partner to implement a new online platform based on SAP Hybris Commerce 5. The challenge was to translate the extensive product portfolio in a user-friendly online catalogue for the customers of Spandex. At the same time, Spandex product managers needed to be able to work with local product offerings and units of measures ideally suited for their market.
One of the strategies to achieve this was to define and build a powerful business logic solution to import the enormous volume of raw product data from SAP ERP into SAP Hybris Commerce. Per country and/or language, Spandex product managers can use the Sap Hybris Product Content Module (PCM) to enrich the products and materials, translate them and place them online where, via facet filtering, customers very quickly find the product they want.
Efficient Browsing
As a supplier of products to the graphics sector, colors obviously play a major role. The application areas of Spandex materials also happen to be amazingly diverse. Needless to say it is paramount that the Spandex customer finds the ideal material online effortlessly. Thanks to the sophisticated navigation system that is available from homepage to product detail page, the customer can easily select brand, durability, width, application and finishing. It allows easy, consistent and efficient navigation through the product range in order to find the desired product or selection of products.
Language & Country Challenge
Spandex, offers such a large selection of products that customers might well be able to choose out of over a hundred variants for a given product. Whether a specific variant or material is available for a specific region is decided at the national level in the catalogue.
In order to keep the workload for updates or new materials as minimal as possible, all product information is immediately passed on to the back office and made available for all product managers. A product will appear online in the local language (e.g. Belgian Dutch) but also have a fallback to a standard language (e.g. Dutch). The local product manager can then, if desired, adapt the standard description and offer the product online.
Phased International Roll-Out
One of the requirements during the project implementation was that Spandex, could plan the roll-out of the online catalog with its many variants per region. Elision developed a solution so that Spandex can manage country rollouts themselves for the local catalog, the personal price calculation and the online ordering separately.
The Spandex Case in a Nutshell
- Multi-brand / Multilanguage B2B environment
- Unified product catalog over multiple brands
- PCM (PIM) and web shop on SAP Hybris Commerce 5
- Enhanced SOLR search
- SAP ERP integration via Camel
- Oracle database
- Google Universal Analytics implementation
