Replatforming from talend to Pimcore

The Haberkorn Group is based in Austria, and Fluidify is a vertical company builder project selling a subset (industrial hosepipes) of Haberkorn's product portfolio via a web shop.

Antiloop’s role was to plan and implement a sophisticated data-quality management system, the primary goal being the provision of a reliable solution that ensures a constant flow of data from the parent company to the subsidiary.

It is common practice for a company builder project to access resources from a parent company. The specific challenge involved warehouses, fulfilment, ERP systems and product data. Since Fluidify’s focus is on industrial hosepipes, it uses a subset of Haberkorn's product range. In addition to hoses, this includes fittings, accessories and tools.

To use these data meaningfully in the Fluidify webshop, and to interlink them within the system, it was necessary to classify product data – and to typify, validate and complete all attributes. However, it became clear the data sets provided were not suitable for these requirements, as the main ‘use case’ of the data was for print purposes.

The first step was a team effort by Antiloop and Fluidify. Both parties cooperated on the development of a data management strategy in a series of workshops. Once the strategy had been defined, the decision was made to use Pimcore as the data-quality platform. Pimcore is now integrated into the system, rather than product data being imported straight into the webshop by the parent company.

Product data is imported into Pimcore by the parent company, where all data is classified, categorised and enriched with the additional data needed for use cases; data that were not previously available. Moreover, mapping functionality was implemented to allow Fluidify to map specific fields based on product category from source to target in a clearly-defined way. If required, Fluidify can overwrite individual attributes. The enhanced data is forwarded to the web shop via REST API.

What started as a data-quality initiative evolved into full-scale PIM implementation of the industrial hosepipe category. In addition to the excellent data-quality, there is now pre-defined workflow for the migration of product data from Haberkorn to Pimcore, and for the implementation thereof. All this was achieved with almost no use of Haberkorn's IT resources, and without interrupting Haberkorn's daily business activities or provision of services.