Grundfos price books 2023: 62 variants via one global tool- Grundfos shows how it's done
Thomas Heuchert and Michael Giesen
The need for a uniform tool that enables the centralized creation of price lists worldwide gave rise to the pioneering project of automated price book creation via the priint:suite. The successful implementation of this ambitious project marks another milestone in the long-standing cooperation between Grundfos and Laudert.
At the beginning of the collaboration, media production for the DACH region was still carried out manually by Laudert, while on the system side, Grundfos used the SAP Commerce Cloud system.
Over time, due to different approaches by the countries, numerous individual price books were created, including Excel files in some cases, which led to an uncontrolled variety. The goal was to create all price books based on a central master. The master was to contain all products and product numbers sold by Grundfos worldwide, so that these could then be derived according to country specifications.
With regard to print production, Grundfos was already aiming to discontinue printed price books before the project began. The reasons were cost savings, environmental aspects, and the constantly fluctuating prices of raw materials. Additionally, printed price books did not allow for short-term adjustments.
Efficient infrastructure
In terms of technology, Grundfos uses a “best of breed” approach. Two databases are used: the SAP enterprise resource planning system and the Grundfos Product Center, which stores additional information about the products.
With the help of the syndication tool Productsup, the data from the upstream databases is structured and prepared for the outbound process. The data is seamlessly integrated 1:1 via API into Akeneo's PIM system. From there, the connection to the priint:suite and other tools or channels takes place.
Today, the Grundfos team is able to produce the publications completely autonomously.
Would you like to gain insights into the project?
Then take a look at our success story with Laudert and Grundfos!
Masterful timing: successful implementation at impressive speed
The project was to be completed within 9 months, a very ambitious goal for an extensive project with permanent performance optimizations. To meet this challenge, the project was divided into several phases in order to integrate experience into the next phase. Thanks to a high level of automation, the impressive result of 62 different language versions is achieved today.
On Fridays at the end of work, I go into the priint:suite, start the workflow and leave for the weekend - on Monday morning, there are 62 finished price lists in the folder.
The creation of interactive price books
For an interactive price book, a copy of the master is created, where an attribute defined by Grundfos is used to decide which products are listed in the desired country version. The modern-looking price books offer customers a sleek design, interactive PDFs, and access to the Grundfos Product Center, where all supplementary, relevant product information, including country-specific prices and documentation, is stored.
With just one click on the product number, customers can access more detailed information and prices in the desired language.
This high degree of automation and the creation of tables with just a few clicks can only be achieved by using the completely configurable templates and by using the table configurator available in priint:planner. The so-called table presets created by Laudert avoid duplication of work.
A significant milestone
Throughout the implementation, many goals were achieved. However, the biggest success, besides data modeling and control, lies in the use of the priint:suite. For the first time in Grundfos' history, a single tool was used for global price book generation.
A look into the future: full automation enables individual price books
Thanks to the high level of automation, which is continuously improved through the use of scripts, Grundfos plans to create around 100 price books per year in 2024. This will enable the integration and inclusion of additional countries in the process. Furthermore, measures are being taken to drive individualization and the creation of customer-specific price books.
Watch the onstage presentation
