Manufacturer HellermannTyton is collaborating with nexoma to master the challenges of modern data transfers for its dealers. Discover how MACH principles were applied to provide an efficient, agile and customer-centric solution for customized catalogs.

Complex partnerships: manufacturers and trade

Retailers typically work with many manufacturers. In terms of communication measures, such as online stores, (electronic) catalogs or analog advertising media, this means integrating data from different companies into the desired process. Therefore, manufacturers strive to provide their dealers with data in the desired specifications. This is the only way to ensure the correct presentation of information on different marketplaces, portals and dealer stores.

HellermannTyton was faced with the challenging task of developing an individualized and customer-centric digitization strategy for its dealers in order to solve the following challenges:

• More customer-specific requirements
• Increasing frequency of data requests
• International data requirements
• Multilingual catalogs
• Individual derivation of assets
• Providing data in real time

In the course of time

Whereas manufacturers used to produce only a handful of catalogs for their dealers, today there are hundreds. Regardless of whether a catalog is created by the manufacturer or directly by the dealer on the basis of the manufacturer's data, today's catalogs must be individualized for the dealer's various product ranges, taking into account country-relevant specifications.

Not only the degree of customization and the output generated, but also the procedural approach has changed over time. The introduction of a customer or dealer portal enables HellermannTyton to offer its customers various formats for the creation of electronic catalogs, which follow the electronic catalog format BMEcat, Excel, CSV or JSON.

nexoma thus masters HellermannTyton's challenges by enabling the automated creation of multilingual catalogs with the ETIM classification standard and other data specifications for over 80,000 products in various countries.

Through the integration of Catalog Express, a software from nexoma, HellermannTyton can either actively provide the product data to the customer via a desired distribution channel or offer the customer the option of retrieving the data as needed via a customized REST API or even connect their own system. Whether to work headless or via the user interface is decided by the personal preferences of the system user. Through the definition of profiles Catalog Express enables the conversion of data from various input sources (PIM, ERP, Excel) into the target format for the desired channel (e.g. Shopware or Amazon). This efficiently links diverse input and output channels. Therefore, HellermannTyton is able to offer retailers an agile and customer-centric solution for personalized catalogs.

The MACH principles

nexoma placed great emphasis on designing and implementing the project for HellermannTyton with MACH principles in mind, in order to establish and ensure modern, agile and efficient data processes. This is because the MACH principles represent a pioneering technology vision designed to ensure companies a flexible, scalable and customer-centric solution for their data processing.

The established principles were formulated by the MACH Alliance. This alliance of approximately 80 companies aims to help businesses navigate the complex future-oriented technology landscape and connect to the best solutions.

The MACH principles in the HellermannTyton project

The implementation of microservices enables complex tasks to be split into small, interacting services and connect them to each other. This enables flexible orchestration of different services and leads to efficient processes for customized applications.

The idea of "API first", which nexoma also follows, means that the first step is to define the API, i.e. the required interfaces for the exchange of product data, before any programming takes place. This enables parallel collaboration and makes it easier for customers to access data in real time.

By using cloud-native technology, the system can dynamically adjust computing capacity to enable rapid scaling. To cope with catalog production peaks, the manufacturer relies on scalable services instead of a monolithic application.

The headless architecture ensures that the application also works without a direct user interface and can be controlled. Today, these agile and scalable approaches enable HellermannTyton to generate catalogs efficiently and provide dealers with individually tailored catalogs.

In summary

The application of MACH principles by nexoma proved to be groundbreaking for HellermannTyton. Thanks to the use of microservices, APIs, cloud-native technologies and a headless architecture, the company was able to establish efficient processes, meet customer-specific requirements and provide tailored eCatalog solutions in real time. This demonstrates that MACH principles represent a modern technology vision that, among other things, helps companies successfully optimize their data processing and better serve customers.

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