Premier Safety
9000+ SKUs, 100+ categories, 20+ customer groups managed seamlessly for BigCommerce, Epicor Prelude, and Unilog
A leader in Safety Equipment Distribution brings products to market faster with DCKAP PIM & DCKAP Integrator
Challenge
Overworked staff and high-cost processes as a result of legacy systems and the need for manual interference at every stage. Difficulty in achieving correct and high quality product information for proper sync with their eCommerce store.
Solution
Saved costs and efforts with faster imports and seamless integration of data of over 14000 SKUs between the content provider and BigCommerce with DCKAP PIM’s BigCommerce connector.
I chose DCKAP PIM for its flexibility. I provided a sample file with 2000 SKUs with rich content and the DCKAP PIM developers were able to take all that information and import it all within hours, not days or weeks. The team has been fantastic to work with. When issues come up, they respond quickly and have a resolution in place within a day or two.
Matt Mellendorf
VP of Digital Strategy and Marketing
at Premier Safety
Starting as Argus Supply Company in 1950, Premier Safety is a leader in the Safety Equipment distribution marketplace in North America. With a comprehensive list of the world’s best brands, they help people buy or rent safety equipment and provide continued service and support thereafter.
Matt Mellendorf, VP of Digital Strategy and Marketing at Premier Safety reached out to us with an integration issue. Premier Safety was managing its back-office operational data with an ERP system. Parallelly, their then-current system did not allow them to add attributes to the products. They were in the course of re-platforming when they started to look for a connector to the ERP. It was then that they found DCKAP PIM as a solution to their product information management challenges.
Legacy systems, overworked staff, and inconsistent product data constituted Premier Safety’s major challenges
- Legacy Systems: The difficulty of managing product information coming from the content provider using a homegrown system.
- Manual Effort: Manually editing and syncing product information from the content provider to the BigCommerce store.
- Catalog Management: Mapping the parent-child relationships between products (categorization) was very time-consuming.
- Attribute Management: Creating and recreating hundreds of attributes using a document and assigning them to the respective products caused SKU duplication resulting in frustration.
(Did we mention: Each SKU had variants that had a minimum of 200+ attributes?) - Auditing Content: Checking product content for manual errors was highly time-consuming.
- High Cost of Management: Managing product information manually for 14000 SKUs with over 700 categories and 20+ customer groups, was expensive.
How Premier Safety used DCKAP PIM to overcome their challenges
Attribute Management:
Premier safety is using attribute management to create attributes for their product SKUs. With over 13 types of attributes to choose from (like text, number, rich text, dimensions, files, and so on), Premier Safety can easily create rich content for their product SKUs, and DCKAP PIM maps each of them to BigCommerce without a glitch.
I like that we can have over 200 attributes for all of our SKUs and each one will map correctly. Everything transfers over to our website without issue and perfectly sets up our product page display.
Matt Mellendorf
VP of Digital Strategy and Marketing at Premier Safety
Catalog Management:
Establishing parent-child relationships between products has proven to be a simple one-time activity for Premier Safety. Assigning a set of products to product groups called “families” makes catalog management easier. It easy to upload and edit product information whether they do it within DCKAP PIM or import it via spreadsheets. All of this information seamlessly syncs over to their CMS with a click of a button.
Premier Safety is now managing 9000+ SKUs with over 100+ categories spread across 20 customer groups with DCKAP PIM.
Governance on User Access to Data:
With their old system, Premier Safety could not control who was accessing their product information. This meant uninformed edits and unresolved errors. Now with the user role management in DCKAP PIM, they have full control over who can access what type of information.
There has been more governance on who can make the updates. In the past, anyone could go into our CMS and update products.
Matt Mellendorf
Easy Product Import and Edits:
Before DCKAP PIM, product imports meant manually copy-pasting product information from the content provider into the CMS. Matt said they had a document with 250+ attributes for a single product SKU which again had variants. Updating that into their CMS using their old system was getting tedious and causing burnout.
With DCKAP PIM’s flexible imports they are now importing bulk data without a hassle.
The imports are almost instant and with error logs, it is easy to catch any exceptions in data quality.
Our Web team spent countless hours adding and replicating SKUs. Now we can import as many as needed via a spreadsheet.
Matt Mellendorf
Automated Sync and Product Completeness:
Product Completeness shows whether a product is ready to be synced to the eCommerce platform. Premier Safety is now relaxed about product data syncing to their BigCommerce platform because they set up a frequency for the automatic sync of completed products to take place.
Without any manual intervention, the completed products are synced to their BigCommerce channel at a preset time.
Bulk Edits made easy with “Rules”:
Bulk editing is a nightmare when it needs to be done manually. Premier Safety used “Rules” to sort products based on an array of available conditions and apply actions on them all at once. Changing pricing during a sale, moving products from one group to another, changing attribute values for products are only some of the advantages of using Rules.
More Bulk Edit Options:
Product lists are filterable based on a variety of factors like SKU, completeness status, name, category to name a few. These filtered lists are selected at once and bulk edits are applied. These edits are also made channel-specific, meaning when they choose the BigCommerce channel, the bulk edits are applied to products that need to be synced with Bigcommerce.
This has helped Premier Safety reduce its time to market.
One of the many benefits we’ve achieved with DCKAP PIM is that now we have a faster time to get products listed on our website.
Matt Mellendorf
Epicor Integration Business Requirements
Premier Safety, being a safety and environment-related brand wanted to do business that would impact humankind and touch their lives. They built their eCommerce store on BigCommerce to sell products seamlessly and connected their backend data with Epicor Prelude to keep the things in tandem and away from any hassles. However, they wanted to automate the entire process of data processing to remove the barrier that prevented their growth. Premier Safety wanted DCKAP Integrator to connect their important data touchpoint so the data flow is generated automatically and periodically.
Epicor Prelude Integration With DCKAP Integrator
Check out the data points connected between eCommerce and ERP to help Premier Safety be more competent in their business. And the benefits that these integrations provide to facilitate business conveniently.
- Customer Sync: BigCommerce > Epicor Prelude
- Product and Pricing Sync: Epicor Prelude > BigCommerce
- Inventory Sync: Epicor Prelude > BigCommerce
- Order Sync: BigCommerce > Epicor Prelude
- Order Processing Sync: Epicor Prelude > BigCommerce
The integration connected by DCKAP Integrator helps Premier Safety to get better control of the business. They can assess which products are doing good business, can always be alert about the inventory levels, access real-time and reliable information based on which business decisions can be taken, and above everything, no need to manually enter data which is time-consuming. Now that the process is automated, the employees can work more time on propelling their business forward. Premier Safety can build a comprehensive approach with a consistent flow of data to thrive online.
Premier Safety – Where are they headed next?
Premier Safety are distributors of life-critical safety products and services. They aim on personalizing their product experience with new technology backed by an expertise of over 70 years. DCKAP PIM is proud to be a partner in their vision of keeping people safe by being a part of their new business strategy that helps in expanding their distribution footfall further into the global market.
