Customer Spotlight: M and G Group
A B2B inriver case study
Read how Muelink & Grol Group used inriver’s PIM and Ctac’s ETIM extension to manage both technical and commercial product information easily within a single system.
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Muelink & Grol (M&G) Group is a leading manufacturer of flue gas exhaust and ventilation systems. Working in partnership with boiler manufacturers, the company assists with the extraction of flue gas inside and around central heating boilers. M&G Group offers a full range of aluminum, stainless steel, and plastic (PP) products. These products are developed by skilled engineers at M&G Group’s production facilities. The company’s business focuses on research & development, innovation and delivering tailor-made solutions to customers around the world.
the challenge: managing commercial information
M&G Group had been using a product information system for many years. In this system, they tagged each product they developed with specific characteristics, including the size of the product, the material it is made of and how users need to install the product. However, that system was less suitable for managing commercial and marketing-related product characteristics.
Wouter Bossink, Product Information Manager at M&G Group: “We couldn’t add marketing materials such as pictures, brochures and detailed product descriptions in the system. As a result, information ended up scattered across separate spreadsheets, documents and folders all over the organization. This made it very complicated to create catalogues and brochures, for example. And that meant it was time to streamline our commercial product information.”
the solution: inriver PIM
After a careful selection procedure, M&G Group chose inriver PIM. “We can now easily add marketing information to the technical features of our products. This allows us to enhance the product information, and all the data is available from a single central location. In addition, we can create digital product sheets such as brochures and leaflets at the touch of a button within inriver PIM. [Our partner] Ctac has developed standard HTML templates that we use with inriver to automatically fill in the right information. If any information changes, the platform also updates the product sheets immediately. This way, we keep our commercial publications up to date,” states Wouter Bossink.
We can now easily add marketing information to the technical features of our products. This allows us to enhance the product information, and all the data is available from a single central location. In addition, we can create digital product sheets such as brochures and leaflets at the touch of a button within inriver PIM.
Wouter Bossink, Product Information Manager at M&G Group
the result: control of up-to-date technical product information
In addition to inriver PIM, M&G Group also opted for Ctac’s ETIM extension. Bossink: “We manage our technical features with inriver PIM using the ETIM classification. ETIM is a technical classification used by the entire chain within the construction, installation and maritime sector to clearly classify products into product classes and to assign characteristics and values. This guarantees the quality of the information, meaning that it can be exchanged between companies without any errors arising from differences in interpretation. However, the challenge is that ETIM is constantly evolving. We need to check, update and extend our product information once a month. This sometimes involves hundreds of changes, which we have to make manually. This is very time-consuming and error-prone.”
With the extension, M&G Group can now import, check and apply new ETIM product classifications automatically. Product changes are automatically sent from inriver PIM to data pools, using BMECat, a standard format in the industry. Wouter Bossink: “The extension enables us to ensure that our product information complies fully with the rules of the data pools, which we use to provide the market with our product information. We can see exactly which fields we need to fill in to provide customers with complete information. In addition, we can retain control of what other information we want to add and share with our customers.”
the impact: compliments regarding data quality
According to Wouter Bossink, M&G Group is now seeing the results of the new PIM system and extension. “The advantage is that we now easily comply with a global ETIM standard, meaning we fully comply with the rules for the Dutch 2BA ETIM data pool and the Belgian Installdata. The nicest compliment came from 2BA when we made our first export using the new system. The data pool itself also checks the data quality from suppliers. We were told that our data quality has increased significantly. We are secretly very proud of that.”
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