Unlocking agility and growth with product experience management

Renishaw is one of the world’s leading engineering and scientific technology companies.

Its expertise is in precision measurement, healthcare and metal 3D printing. This means Renishaw supplies products and services for applications as diverse as jet engine manufacturing, brain surgery and consumer electronics production. Renishaw sells these products through a variety of channels, including an ecommerce platform and through a global network of wholly owned subsidiaries and third-party distributors.

Renishaw’s diverse customer base makes for an extensive product catalog.

The company’s online store currently counts over 2,000 SKUs, arranged into nine product categories and over 80 subcategories. These range from consumables and accessories to highly specialized, complex products. The company’s ecommerce platform is located in 26 different regions and appears in 13 languages. This complexity meant up to 465,000 individual data points had to be maintained with limited tools.

Renishaw also supports dozens of subsidiaries and third-party distributors across the globe. Each of these partners requires their own catalogue of products and data in a variety of different formats. Legacy processes often required IT to run SQL queries each time a distributor needed data. With competing IT priorities, this backlog could take weeks.

Renishaw’s team had built a product information management (PIM) tool to help manage product information on their online store, but the legacy software was unable to keep pace with the company’s ambitions. Four key areas for improvement were identified:

• Product data enrichment was cumbersome, and the process was poorly defined. That meant product data ended up with gaps, and someone would have to perform manual reviews.

• Global support was insufficient. For a given product, there might be 15 data fields that require translation into 13 languages. The legacy PIM had trouble managing that information.

• Product management and ecommerce teams lacked control over product data. If they needed to export data, someone from the IT team had to run a query to generate that file. Even sending data to a distributor was time-consuming.

• Processes couldn’t scale effectively. Creating a new field for a product was slow and costly, both for IT and for the business. This put a ceiling on digital commerce growth.

Valtech’s Global Product Experience Management (PXM) team tackled each of Renishaw’s challenges one-by-one.

A defined product enrichment process

We implemented a modern PIM solution, Salsify, that empowers teams to easily navigate and update content.

From there, we established clear and collaborative workflows for important tasks such as product data enrichment, translations and content creation. The new process added a governance framework to bring safeguards to the process and improve visibility.

Products are now assigned product representatives, who collaborate through in-app comments and feedback that allow recursive review. When content is ready, the products are sent to the ecommerce team for final approval. Governance rules prevent products from being published until the ecommerce team has given approval.

This transformed product enrichment from a cumbersome process to an agile one.

Streamlined translation

We approached the translation challenge as a design problem.

By converting many data-input fields into picklists, we proceduralized a lot of the translation work. Then, we designed workflows so people could tag products whose data needed to be translated (or re-translated) and created a channel for passing copy to the translation system.

This automated much of the work necessary to push out 13 translations of product information.

Self-service data export

We empowered the ecommerce team to export data as needed by defining key data syndication needs and creating the necessary export templates.

We then built self-service catalogs — with clear user permissions and an intuitive interface — so sales teams could directly access data. Finally, we mapped all the channels for exporting product data to a distribution partner, in that partner’s required format.

This means partners can get product data within minutes, not days, as often happened before.

Scalable tools for products and channels

We established a no-code approach to PIM that is easier to use, administer and scale.

Content owners can quickly add new products. Then, we built a program for launching new distributors partners channels and trained PIM champions who could be responsible for creating new fields and managing updates.

This unlocked crucial scalability and removed the ceiling over digital commerce and distributor sales growth.

Renishaw’s Salsify PXM Program has been a remarkable success and laid the foundations for future digital commerce developments.

It went live in September 2022 with 1,970 products. In just more than a year, Renishaw’s team has added 206 more products seamlessly. This 10% increase has proven the value of Salsify, and the team is currently exploring more categories to add.

Removing ambiguity around product fields and processes has also improved the quality of the content available to customers. Products that had information gaps are now fully enriched, which gives both distributors and B2B shoppers a complete understanding of those products’ value.

The Salsify PXM Program has streamlined data for sales teams. Those teams can now find the right data in the right format for their digital commerce and distributor channels. This means less time spent looking for information and more time available for sales-generating activities.

Finally, Renishaw’s path forward is clear and wide open. By empowering PIM champions, content owners and sales teams, Valtech has helped Renishaw pave the way toward a sustainable and successful future.