Upgraded Office Choice Product Information Management System

As one of Australia’s largest B2B office suppliers, Office Choice stores cater for a broad range of customers including SMEs, government sectors, educational institutions and personal customers. Office Choice stocks an extensive range of stationery, technology, and furniture and office solutions such as canteen, janitorial and printing services.

Business Needs

Office Choice is a buying group that maintains supply relationships with all the key stationery manufacturers and distributors (suppliers) in Australia. Members of Office Choice (aka Dealers) can order products from these suppliers at the centrally negotiated price as part of their membership package. Additional services offered to Office Choice dealers are the production of a paper-based 500 page Full Line Catalogue and marketing support with 4 major national advertising campaigns scheduled each year.

Office Choice uses an MS SQL/.Net application (“Intranet”) to manage the product, supplier, catalog and promotion activities within the group. The Intranet is a bespoke application developed in-house over the past 10 years and provides a host of other non-PIM functions that needed to be replaced over time.

But, there was no functionality to update data in bulk and no error report for each field of a product. It was difficult to maintain the current system without these major functions since it required manual checkup.

Pimcore Solution

Office Choice wanted to implement a new Product Information Management (PIM) system to replace the existing system currently in place. The new PIM system had to be based on Pimcore with customization and configuration designed to replicate and enhance the client’s existing PIM functionality. Pimcore now provides a reliable product information management (PIM) system with error reports and bulk data update functionalities.

Business Results

Office Choice has expressed their positive feedback since Pimcore reduces their overhead time and ability to manage their products through the system. They are able to get a detailed error log for each product with a bulk update feature that did not exist in their previous system. The switch to Pimcore has proven to be an excellent choice for users to easily manage and maintain the product information.

For more information on how acidgreen can implement a PIM for your organisation please contact us.