How Hansgrohe uses the Productsup Product-to-Consumer platform to automate its product data distribution

Case

About Hansgrohe

Hansgrohe is one of the world’s leading sanitary fittings manufacturers. What began as a family business is now an internationally active group with headquarters in Germany. The company has over 5,400 employees worldwide and boasts a total turnover of 1.365 billion euro*. With 34 subsidiaries and 21 sales offices worldwide, the company exports products to more than 140 countries. The group sells its products under two brand names: Axor and Hansgrohe. Their product offering includes items like shower heads, hand showers, and faucet supplies.

*FY 2021

Hansgrohe and Productsup

Hansgrohe was looking for a partner aligned with its premium brand image. Its brand identity is all about high-quality products and excellent service. That’s why it was crucial for Hansgrohe that the distributors and resellers selling its products online also conveyed this message to their customers.

Maintaining a consistent brand identity across all channels is challenging because it requires a robust product content syndication solution that can automatically meet the requirements of hundreds of recipients while also ensuring data quality and consistency across thousands of consumer touchpoints.

The Productsup Product-to-Consumer (P2C) platform enables Hansgrohe to ensure high-quality content on whatever market, language, or distribution channel. Consistent and accurate product content directly impacts conversions and sales, which, in turn, increases revenue and brand value.

Challenges

• Centralization of product data
• Distinct channel requirements
• Lack of dynamic adaption & flexibility

Hansgrohe faced a significant challenge when providing product content to various channels in the appropriate format – i.e., industry databases, distributors, wholesalers, customers, etc. Hansgrohe had to collect and centralize all data from multiple sources – PIM, DAM, ERP – before distributing it in several languages and countries.

The challenges were compounded by the fact that Hansgrohe had different routes to market, including traditional trade and distribution channels that required specific technical formats such as BMEcat* or FAB-DIS*, as well as ecommerce retailers that didn’t follow a standardized format but had unique data requirements.

Not only multiple channels and markets added complexity to Hansgrohe’s operation, they also had to adhere to the industry standard classification of their products like ETIM. All of these challenges translated into countless hours of unnecessary manual labor. Additionally, constantly evolving requirements meant that product data had to be continuously adapted, which wasted even more time and resources.

Hansgrohe needed a product content syndication tool that provided maximum automation and data accuracy while guaranteeing the highest levels of flexibility and data quality across channels.

Solutions

• Proof of concept
• Platform setup
• Data quality check

Hansgrohe created a proof of concept to test the P2C partners they shortlisted. The team built two data exports to determine if the Productsup platform could meet their requirements: an industry database export and a customer-specific data export.

They first defined the data sources as well as the interfaces for the Productsup P2C platform. The data was then transferred from Hansgrohe’s Product Information Management (PIM) system to Productsup. In the next step, they set up the standard sources for using the data by country and category and the corresponding data export channels using the platform functionalities.

Before handing over the data to their recipients, the team could check the data quality using Productsup’s Dataview function, ensuring accuracy and consistency.

Results

• Setup of channel-/customer-specific data exports, like ETIM, BMEcat, ARGE, BMDG, and FAB-DIS exports
• Automated classification of product catalog according to ETIM*
• Increased product data quality

Since April 2021, Hansgrohe has already implemented 35 channel-specific or customer-specific data exports in 11 languages. Their team is constantly working on adding new export channels and languages to the existing portfolio.

Hansgrohe leverages the platform’s features and connections to handle a wide range of data pools, including Building Masterdata (BMDG), ARGE* in the DACH region, 2ba* in the Netherlands or FAB-DIS as well as several customer-specific data exports. They have automated the classification of their global product range according to the industry standard ETIM 8.0. They have also automated the preparation & delivery of product data to industry data pools for the French and Dutch markets.

In addition, Hansgrohe guarantees the success of every launch and existing product catalog by using Productsup’s centralized dashboards to check if their product data quality meets the requirements. Due to its easy-to-read setup, Productsup offers the business departments at Hansgrohe the possibility to create a large number of data exports quickly and easily in the shortest possible time without any programming knowledge. Since 2021, more than 60 different data feeds have been made available to customers to date (Sept. 2022).

It now takes a Hansgrohe team member less than a day to set up a new content export for a retailer. This process used to take weeks or even months.

Appendix

*BMEcat - an xml-based standard for exchange of product data used in construction, plumbing, electrotechnical and other sectors, especially common in Central and Northern Europe.

*FAB-DIS - an excel-based standard for exchange of product data used in construction, plumbing, electrotechnical and other sectors, used primarily in France.

*ETIM - the international classification standard for technical products. Adding structure to the flow of technical

*ARGE - an association of manufacturers in the HVAC sector in Germany that offers a data pool & mandates data quality requirements for exchange of product data in the HVAC sector.

*2ba - a data pool for exchange of product data in the construction sector in the Netherlands.