Thule Group is a leading sports and outdoor goods company, with 138 sales markets worldwide. The company has experienced rapid growth in both product types and market scope since it was founded in 1942. Thule's product line includes sport and cargo carriers (roof racks, roof boxes and carriers for transporting cycling, water and winter sports equipment, and rooftop tents mounted on a car), juvenile and pet products (car seats, strollers, bike trailers, child bike seats and dog transport), RV products (awnings, bike carriers and tents fro RVs and caravans) and packs, bags and luggage (hiking backpacks, luggage, laptop and camera bags).
A long-time Stibo Systems customer, Thule has used Stibo Systems Enterprise Platform (STEP) as its product information management (PIM) system. Recently, the company implemented the web user interface (WebUI), as well as Stibo Systems Data as a Service (DaaS), to further improve the effectiveness of its content management and push data to its front-end sites in near real time.
Challenges
Market diversity
Thule sells its three brands – Thule, Case Logic and SportRack – through a variety of business-to-business, direct-to-consumer (DTC) and retail ecommerce channels. Its sales operations cover more than 130 markets and more than 24 languages, requiring an efficient, cost-effective means of managing and syndicating product content across multiple markets.
More product categories, more content to manage
Thule has grown quickly over the past several years, organically and through acquisitions. Promoting the company’s robust product portfolio through its digital channels requires an increasing amount of product information – ranging from A+ and enriched content to assets and videos – in record time.
Multiple data sources caused slow and cumbersome processing
Before implementing Stibo Systems DaaS extension, Thule worked through countless data sets from numerous sources, a process that required 30+ outbound integrations. The unintended result of these integrations was that publishing data changes to its front-end sites could easily take over 10 hours.
Solutions
Flexible product data management enabled Thule’s growing ecommerce presence
For the past 15 years, Thule has used STEP as its product data management/PIM system to support the marketing and ecommerce activities for its growing portfolio of customizable products. STEP feeds product data to the company’s ecommerce sites, internal databases, and to other systems for external data syndication to retailers.
The robust product data management platform enabled Thule to engineer a complex car hierarchy that integrates with its Thule.net and Thule.com sites. This allowed consumers to select from listed options for customization between the product (such as specialized roof rack components like bars, feet and kits) and their specific vehicle make and model. The result was a better user purchase experience and higher satisfaction with the product they purchased.
“We have a car hierarchy in STEP, which our engineers have built up since Thule’s implementation of STEP in 2009. This hierarchy holds all the vehicles that exist in the market for which we have roof racks, rear-door mounted bike racks, RV awnings, dog crates and car seats. The web of connections between car hierarchy objects and SKUs is sent to our front-end sites for customers and consumers, where we have the vehicle selector functionality. There, they can select a vehicle and get the fit recommendations from us.” - Antonio Diaz, Product Owner PIM, Thule Group
The company also recently implemented the WebUI to enable more cross-functional teams to work within the product data management platform to further improve the company’s sales and marketing activities and ecommerce functionality. The WebUI application makes it easier to manage product content in multiple markets, deploy faster commercial changes and clear end-of-life products.
High-speed, coordinated data management
Stibo Systems DaaS extension provided Thule with near real-time access to master data from STEP by using a configurable API through a cloud-based architecture.
This reduced infrastructure requirements for middleware by over 80% and eliminated the need for servers and hardware to synchronize data events and changes. Thule’s implementation of DaaS cut processing time from hours or days to seconds, providing greater control over its data and visibility into the different points where data is handled.
“We have minimized the time we spend troubleshooting, so we have more time for development.” - Antonio Diaz, Product Owner PIM, Thule Group
To summarize, the robust product data management platform and DaaS enabled the following:
- Sophisticated product hierarchy integration: Developed a detailed car hierarchy that integrates with the ecommerce site, allowing consumers to easily select roof racks that precisely fit their vehicle's make and model.
- Near real-time data in sales channels: Cleared the way for efficient management and synchronization of extensive product data across many sales channels, enabling faster commercial changes.
- Reduced infrastructure requirements: Over 80% reduction in middleware infrastructure needs, which minimized reliance on physical servers and hardware.
- Faster data processing: Cut the data processing time dramatically from hours or days to mere seconds.
- Improved data accessibility: Provided near real-time access to master data, facilitating quick and informed decision making and operations.
Learn more about the solutions:
Outcomes
Since Thule implemented the STEP WebUI, the company has seen significant improvements in one of its brand’s DTC businesses. The brand – which operates in 11 European markets, with content in nine languages and prices in six currencies – has experienced 25% sales growth over the previous year’s online sales. Thule attributes this revenue increase in part to incorporating DaaS into its PIM/product data management strategy due to:
- Increased sales and marketing activities enabled by MDM
- Improved user and customer experiences
Additionally, with the implementation of the STEP WebUI version, Thule reports drastically reduced training time and a decreased learning curve, which has resulted in a more manageable onboarding process for new colleagues.
