ETIM in practice

A YellowGround customer, who has implemented STIBO STEP as an MDM system, uses the ETIM standard. Why do they use ETIM? What did the project consist of? What was the result of the cooperation between YellowGround and the customer, active in the labels and printers sector? Read all about it in the blog.

WHY DID THE CUSTOMER CHOOSE ETIM?

Our customer has a large number of partners in the electrical sector. ETIM was originally built for the electrical sector, but now has a wider application. Their largest customers are standardized on ETIM and therefore expect ETIM standardized information. The choice for STIBO STEP also has enormous advantages in this case. The setup between ETIM and STEP is convenient, a lot of logic has been built by STIBO. You can easily run the import of a new classification without errors, thanks to the built-in logic that facilitates an import. There is very little manual mapping involved.

Read more about STIBO STEP here

THE PROJECT

In the summer of 2020, YellowGround supported the customer to gain more insight into their data enrichment. The customer has two administrative offices, one in the US and one in Europe. Until last year, these offices were on two different STIBO STEP systems. But that changed in 2020 when the two systems were merged. The office in Europe was faced with a number of questions and challenges. The team in Europe exports their product data for a number of their distributors, a number of these distributors have normalized their data on the ETIM classification.

The first question asked to YellowGround was about exchanging data via BME CAT, which is a standardized template. When you export your data using the BME CAT template, other parties can easily read that template. True plug and play. In the current situation, the BME CAT export at our customer was not done via STEP, but via a separate application. YellowGround’s proposal is to run this via STEP. At the moment, a huge amount of time is wasted sending the CVS back and forth for validation from Europe to the US and back. Whenever errors are noticed, the traffic jam has to go all the way back and forth. This takes several days every time and should be faster. In STEP there is a BME CAT formula, you can do the validation of the file immediately while you are creating the file in STEP. You will also immediately receive an error message, which you can intervene on. The biggest benefit for the customer is a faster time-to-market with the traffic jam. BME CAT is very similar to the ETIM fields that are in their system. If you can share the values of ETIM with BME CAT, the partner can read this information perfectly via a BME CAT import.

Daarnaast wou de klant ook weten wat overschakelen van hun huidige versie van ETIM naar de nieuwste versie, ETIM 8, voor hen zou betekenen. YellowGround bracht dit in kaart. We bekeken de mogelijke bottlenecks, maar ook de voordelen. Zo is het bij de nieuwste versie makkelijker om nieuwe attributen te vullen, die niet beschikbaar waren bij de oude versie. De klant zal dit jaar overschakelen naar ETIM 8.

Read more about ETIM 8 here

THE RESULT

As you could already read, the adjustments that YellowGround proposes will save you a lot of time. They have therefore systematically started implementing the changes at the customer. The collaboration is still ongoing and there are still some optimisations planned. ETIM is a must for our customer’s business and for the service they can offer to their customers. We are curious what the future will bring.

Do you use the ETIM standard yourself and do you want to know what a PIM or MDM implementation can mean for your company?

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