Temal is a family business whose roots stretch right back to 1920. The company manufactures tailored furnishings for bathrooms, utility rooms, and kitchens at their 2 factories in Järvenpää and Nakkila. Temal trusts in functional design which highlights the individual features of each home, allowing people the freedom to choose the best solution for their particular home.
“Our project with RockOn kicked off in style and finished even better. We kept to the timetable agreed, and the continuous monitoring and reporting worked well. So well, in fact, that we decided to put a store online after that too.”
Nina Zischka, CEO, Temal
EVERY ROSE HAS ITS THORN – MAKING PIM A HELLUVA LOT EASIER…
The expertise and strength of Temal’s business lies in creating products that are high-quality and carefully tailored to each home’s needs. The sheer range of multifaceted requirements this needs would be capable of tying even the most seasoned ERP jockey into knots like so many tangled guitar leads. Freedom of choice brings with it great amounts of product information, and to manually transfer and update it takes a lot of time.
“PIM is at the heart of all digital business”, Temal’s CEO, Nina Zischka, explains. “Our product information database for example is staggeringly extensive, and it was formerly managed on just spreadsheets, so this simply had to be done!”
Everyone familiar with mathematics knows how quickly the possible permutations grow when there are several features each with several choices. With Temal, a good example of this would be a simple under-basin unit. At its narrowest it is 40 cm and at its widest 120cm, with different options at every 5 cm in between. This alone makes 16 different variations. Then there is the depth of the same product varying between 30 and 50 cm, with options at every 5 cm – meaning 5 different options for the product’s depth. Altogether that means there are 80 different width and depth combinations. If you then add options for colour, doors, drawers, and handles, not to mention the location of the tap, and you’re looking at thousands, and even the most seasoned rocker is going to be left reeling.
Temal carried out an extensive tendering procedure to find a reliable partner to help them update their PIM. “We had no preconception of who would be the best for the job”, Nina explains, “we were simply looking for someone who was experienced and reliable, and RockOn had everything we wanted and great references to boot, so we chose them. This is such a central part of our business that we needed it done really well”.
When our band arrived at the venue for this gig, there were thousands of pieces of product information being manually moved around from one spreadsheet to another. It was time to do some arrangements so product information would henceforth be created and managed more efficiently, and to increase their digital presence and online sales. The result was cutting costs, saving time and soothing nerves. Now the PIM system is basically a helluva lot easier.
TAKE MY HAND… WE’LL MAKE IT, I SWEAR! REMOVING MENIAL TASKS WITH A PRODUCT CONFIGURATOR
The main plan was to ensure that the challenges of PIM would not cause a bottle-neck for sales, so RockOn built Temal a product configurator, that would create all the possible product configurations automatically within their own fully customised RockOn PIM; at which point the configuration could be distributed via sales channels, brochures and the ERP. The configurator creates each product and its sales code automatically, so that Temal could for example add new colour options, and it doesn’t mean putting thousands of new product rows into the ERP. The same system also helps with mechanical and logistical aspects of the work at many stages too. For example, information about the weight of the product can be generated from this data.
The product configurator helps centralise the production and management of product information in one place, making it easier to create information not just for the online store that’s being built, but also the website, printed catalogues, product brochures, and any BIM-systems too – the same system can help people make use of product information both inside and outside the company. Next on the set list is how to automatically transfer information to resellers. This will save time for both Temal and the reseller, and it will help keep product information uniformly updated across all channels and all the way to the consumer.
With the new system, people at Temal can really channel their energies into the work they do with passion, and leave the mundanities of moving data around to the system. There is now much less mechanical updating that needs to be done and PIM is much better now that the system alerts users when information is missing.
“For us, solid skills and know-how is essential, as is finishing the project as agreed – especially when you know there are a lot of daydreamers out there too. Right from the start RockOn gave us a very realistic timetable, a competitive price, and good cost information. We didn’t have to worry about surprise expenses – everything was done as agreed. This was a large investment, so it was important to get this right straight away.”
To be continued
RockOn and Temal continue to tour together, and their next project is to develop the online store together. More about that on the next album!