Scalable PIM Solution
Jacuzzi is the world leader in hot tub and spa manufacturing, whose digital presence is a primary source of success. Jacuzzi continues to grow its product lines and presence across 15+ brands and 45 countries. The company’s revenue has grown 2x in the last 4 years. The need to manage product data correctly has never been more important.
Challenge
Jacuzzi faced significant challenges as it outgrew its former product information management platform. The former platform was suitable for small-scale operations, but over time it was unable to meet the expanding demands of a global manufacturer to efficiently manage and syndicate its complex products and parts data. Jacuzzi operates 15+ brands and an expansive sales channel, including many independent dealers, across many countries, languages, and currencies. The data model was not architected with a long-term horizon to handle the complex aspects of Jacuzzi's business model nor the SKU variations and taxonomies at an enterprise level.
As a result, the internal product data owners at Jacuzzi had to regularly export data from their former platform and then manipulate Excel files in order to properly import data and images to their global sales channels. This manual process was highly inefficient and error-prone, making it unsustainable in the long term. Jacuzzi explored solving these platform gaps by rewriting their data models and configurations. These efforts fell short as the former solution offered limited development resources to assist and lacked a strong enough partner network to turn to.
Costly business problems drove Jacuzzi to evaluate new platforms. The next platform needed to be flexible enough to handle the unique needs of their business and provide a more efficient way to manage and syndicate their product data.
Results
In order to address these challenges, Jacuzzi partnered with Layer One to architect a sustainable product data model. Built for the long term yet focusing on an initial group of brands for key stakeholders, this new data model was able to accommodate the large number of configurable products and related parts across all the divisions inside of Jacuzzi. The solution centralized all the product data and images within inriver PIM to create scalability for a high-growth business. After extensive cleanup of redundant data and fields, Layer One imported all the data from Jacuzzi's old platform to the new one for the launch of phase one. The total first phase of the project took 7 months from planning to live data on Jacuzzi.com.
As a result of this implementation, Jacuzzi's new inriver tool is now integrated with Salesforce Commerce Cloud and is in the process of being integrated into Sitecore OrderCloud on several other web properties. With the new solution, a small set of non-technical users are now able to quickly change products and assets across channels. The amount of time to change and publish data changes is a fraction of the time, and there is also a pre-check from the workflow tools that all enrichment is complete for live products. This greatly reduces the amount of human error and saves hours per week.
Layer One continues to add functionality to the Jacuzzi inriver tool and runs training for the Jacuzzi product team to be successful with the day-to-day functions of inriver. This ensures that Jacuzzi is able to continue to efficiently manage and publish its product data in the future.
For years, PIM was the thing that got in the way of product launches and updates. Now, with Layer One’s work, it’s a critical tool that streamlines our normal processes and allows us to focus on improvements.
