SUCCESS STORY
How e-tailer bol.com gets a grip on its vast volumes of images
Results & benefits
- Product specialists are now in full control of the images of their products.
- The image workflow is now widely automated, enabling an outstanding level of efficiency.
- The images are now published in the webshop within only two hours instead of 24 hours or more with the legacy system.
- Elvis DAM is transparently integrated with the product information system (PIM) used by bol.com.
About the customer
bol.com is the largest e-tailer in the Netherlands. It's the market leader in online sales of books, entertainment products, electrical appliances, and toys. The company has the widest range of speciality stores. The award-winning company has more than 5.8 million active customers and offers more than 10 million articles. bol.com opened its platform for other sellers, today enabling several thousands of business sellers to offer their products to the catalog. bol.com was selected by 50,000 consumers as Best Online Warehouse. In addition, a professional jury awarded bol.com as best Mobile Webshop in the Netherlands.
WoodWing Elvis DAM enabled us to automate and streamline our complex image workflow. We reached a very high level of efficiency, with all product specialists in full control of all the images of the products they are responsible for.
Challenges
bol.com needs to efficiently deal with the stock of 100 million assets and deal with an average of 300,000 images delivered by more than 1,500 sources every day. But the existing workflows for handling the images provided by suppliers were time consuming and error prone, and the product managers were not able to manage the images of their products in a practical manner. The legacy system did not provide a comfortable user interface or any monitoring options. Furthermore, processing an image from import to the web shop took 24 hours or more.
Evaluation
To solve the issues bol.com decided to implement a dedicated digital asset management system that would allow to manage the images efficiently, as well as to automate and streamline the complex image workflow. Suppliers should be able to upload their images via various options, including FTP and automatic feeds. Product specialists should be able to take full responsibility for the images of their products.
An essential requirement was the ability to match images to a bol.com object in the product catalog maintained in the Product Information Management system (PIM). The system should be capable to handle the comprehensive set of metadata, including the data provided by the suppliers. It should be able to match the high security requirements at bol.com and provide comprehensive monitoring features.
The company decided to implement a combination of a system created in-house called Digital Asset Service (DAS) with Elvis DAM.
Implementation / Integration
Graphit, a partner of WoodWing, created a convenient, customized and branded user interface for Elvis DAM. The system acts as the user-friendly frontend of the DAS, making all images and metadata visible to the product specialists. The DAS is the underlying system that handles import and export of assets and connects to the product information system (PIM). Utilizing a fast and reliable matching mechanism, the system checks the PIM for a match for any new image.
When various images are available from different suppliers for the same product, the system scores the images to identify the best-quality photo based on an image rating per supplier. The images are immediately displayed in Elvis DAM and are automatically processed from new to match to publish.
Integration with other systems used by bol.com is planned. In the long run, all assets such as package inserts, energy labels, manuals and more will be managed with the system.
The implementation of Elvis DAM at bol.com showcases how a digital asset management system seamlessly integrated in the existing software environment can help to optimize business processes to the max.
Results & benefits
- The high level of automation led to a tremendous increase in efficiency.
- The images are now published in the webshop within only two hours instead of 24 hours or more with the legacy system
- The system allows the team to monitor all assets and processes, utilizing reporting options, KPIs, performance checks and signalizing in case of failure.
- Every product image is converted into up to six different dimensions used to promote the product on the platform – including the images for the zoom feature.
- In the case of faulty or not matched images, the product specialists can now see directly in Elvis DAM what the problem is – a significant acceleration of the workflow.
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