Danfoss is an international organization offering innovative solutions that increase machine productivity, cut emissions, reduce energy usage and facilitate electrification, all while focusing on energy efficiency. Danfoss offers an extensive product line with solutions across three primary segments of business: Danfoss Climate Solutions, Danfoss Drives, and Danfoss Power Solutions.
Across these segments, Danfoss supports various industries, including automotive, commercial and residential buildings, energy and natural resources, food and beverage, marine and offshore, mobile hydraulics, refrigeration and air conditioning, and water and wastewater.
Challenges
With sales in more than 100 countries, continuous growth and expansion, and multiple configurable products, Danfoss sought data management solutions as dynamic and agile as the company itself – in a scalable way that efficiently responds to customers’ needs.
Danfoss offers many configurable products, so when a customer contacts them, Danfoss creates a specific product based on the customer’s needs and specifications. These new product variants are configured and created in the ERP, but then the variants need to be integrated into the sales platform and sent to the store so that the product can be purchased by the customer. The process of continually customizing new product variants requires multiple data interactions, all of which must be completed on a timely basis in order to meet the present needs of the customer.
To summarize, Danfoss was experiencing the following challenges.
- Global operations: Danfoss sells products in over 100 countries, which requires a complex and efficient data management system.
- Growth and scalability: The company is growing fast and needs a data system that can keep up.
- Customizable products: Danfoss makes customized products for each customer, complicating the data management process.
- Data complexity: Managing the vast amount of data from different business segments is difficult. This includes ensuring data quality, translations, and organizing information into categories.
- Speed and efficiency: To meet customer demands, products must be processed and customized quickly, which requires fast and reliable data handling.
Solutions
Data as a service (DaaS) provides Danfoss with the speed and agility to integrate and interpret product data in near real-time. In turn, the product data management/PIM system, which manages and governs information such as product attributes, taxonomy, hierarchies, translations and data quality, integrates a continual stream of new product variants that are translated to customer experiences within seconds. DaaS allows continual data to process nearly instantly at the sales endpoint, yet at the global scale required by Danfoss’s worldwide operations.
These solutions offer a host of benefits, including:
- Real-time data integration: Danfoss can instantly integrate and interpret data, keeping operations fast and efficient.
- Improved customer experience: The system translates new product variants to customer experiences quickly, enhancing customer satisfaction.
- Global scalability: The solutions work globally, supporting Danfoss’s operations in over 100 countries.
- Speed in processing: DaaS processes data almost instantly, ensuring sales can occur without delays.
“Our product domain model supports 1.5 million products in 33 languages, product presentation hierarchies, taxonomy, and around 8,000 attributes at the moment. So, a substantial amount of data must be exported to the front end. We feared that the DaaS couldn't handle the amount of data. But we saw that it can scale to serve the amount of data that we saw here. It scales quite nicely. So, you can actually perform a lot of parallel calls and serve your customer that way.” - Bent Werner Lausen, Head of PIM/DAM Solutions, Danfoss
Outcomes
For companies like Danfoss that operate at a substantial and multinational scale, data integration too often comes at the expense of efficiency. DaaS solves that challenge by integrating data in near real-time, distributing master data to front-end consumers while exporting new products to the customer endpoint as the sales transaction occurs.
The result is data-driven decision making, customized products, and consumer experiences that take only minutes, yet are scaled to global operations.
