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Information ManagementSUCCESS STORY

Benders’ website includes inspirational images that show what its products look like in real settings. Visitors can click on each product in an image to navigate directly to the specific web page with detailed product information. “I believe we’re the only ones to offer this kind of service,” says Benders’ Christer Pettersson. The image above is of Megastone masonry blocks. Photo: BENDERS

Facts about Benders:

• Manufactures and sells mainly roof tiles and paving stones. Has a range of new business areas in the pipeline.

• Employs approximately 500 staff, SEK 1.4 billion in sales.

• Produces roof tiles equivalent to 250 residential house roofs per day and paving stones equivalent to two soc-cer fields per day.

• Has 3,000 items in its product range.

• Head office located in Edsvära, Kvänum, Sweden.

• Has production facilities, warehouses, agents, and sales companies across Europe.

C4 CONTEXTURE POWERS BENDERS ONLINE SOLUTION

Benders has been growing for almost 55 years. Today, the company is active within four business areas. Benders is one of the Nordic market’s leading producers of roofing, paving, and landscaping products. What’s more, the company continues to win market share in new European markets, at the same time as its ranges of concrete and granite products expand with each season. These include natural stone, foundation, masonry, and infrastructure products.

Since its founding in 1960, it has always focused on satisfying customer needs, something that is clearly visible in its new website, which it launched last spring. The website is based on EPiServer as a CMS platform, where C4, which the company has used for several years, feeds the website with all the information to present, a large part of which is channeled from Movex/M3.

”Without a functioning PIM system with the relationships and information logistics

we have already built up behind us, we would never have been able to produce the website we wanted. Achieving what we have achieved requires first investing in a PIM system and then building a website, not the other way around. Otherwise, you risk not getting the result you want from your invest-ment”, says Benders Christer Pettersson.

Relationships Build a Powerful Site Pettersson explains that one of the benefits of having a PIM system is better data control through well-functioning information logistics. Thanks to Media Central from Finfo, Benders is able to distribute sales-related information for the items stored in Finfo in the same way as other suppliers do. Finfo manages information about more than 1,500,000 items from over 400 suppliers and makes it possible to direct all customers to one place where they can retrieve product information from multiple suppliers in a unified way. >>

Benders new website is based on EPiServer and C4 Contexture. – Without a functioning PIM system with the relationships and information logistics we have already built up behind us, we would never have been able to produce the website we wanted, says Christer Pettersson, Marketing Communications Manager Benders.

Christer Pettersson

UDK was founded in 1987 and is a successful and creative knowledge company thatis continually evolving and developing. We work with system development, businesssystems, security, technology, and training. Our customers are found in every industryand in the public sector. We have offices in Umeå, Luleå, and Gothenburg, Sweden.

”Achieving what we have achieved requires first investing in a PIM system and then building a website, not the other way around. Otherwise, you risk not getting the result you want from your investment”

Christer PetterssonMarketing Communications Manager, Benders

Success story Information Management UDK’s product for information management, PIM, IMAGE BANK, and ARCHIVE we mainly supply to manufacturing and distribution companies in the Nordic countries. The product is called C4 Contexture and makes it possible to store, organize, and distribute information that customers, partners, and employees want. Images, documents, videos, drawings, texts, and product details—all are available and maintained in C4.

SUCCESS STORY

C4

One of a PIM system’s most important jobs is keeping all the categorizations of data, images, and documents and the relationships between data in order. At Benders, C4 does the hard work of feeding the website and supporting internal processes.

”Using the PIM system, we can link basic data about our products located in the business system to documents, images, and more. We can also create simple relationships between versions of the same product, such as roof tiles, where color is the only difference. They can still be managed as one product in the PIM system, instead of being managed separately, which opens up a lot of pos-sibilities when presenting and managing products on a website. We can also link products to one another, like ‘good-to-have’ products,” Pettersson explains.

Website as a salesperson These “good-to-have” products might be things that are important when buying a certain roof tile, like installation tools or decorative products, but can also be alternatives to the product the customer is viewing. “We want our website to work like a salesperson in a store and, using our know-how about our range,

to recommend products related to the main product the customer is interested in. Simply put, we want it to be able to say: ‘You might need this too.’”

One interesting function that Benders has worked on is harnessing its website’s ability to adapt to the visitor’s point of entrance. “Some visitors are looking for inspiration and, through our inspirational images, can find the exact products shown in the picture. Other visitors go straight to a product category or a particular product. In connection with the product information, they can also find inspirational images that help them decide which product they want. Thanks to EPi-Server and C4, we can use our website as a tool for inspiring our customers.

Inspired by Home Electronics Pettersson explains that the website’s presentation of information was inspired in part by the way the home electronics industry builds websites. “Although we don’t sell our products directly through our website, I’m fascinated by those who have succeeded in thinking one step ahead when it comes to what information is provided to the visitor, depending on where they are on the site. One example is to provide tips on similar products;

something that we also do on our site. Our visitors should be able to print all the information they need from our site and then take it to one of our resellers, whose addresses we provide on our site.

Another function made possible thanks to information logistics is that visitors can access products in many different ways, either hierarchically by product type or by accessing the documents related the products. “We have produced a data model in C4 that generates the product structure on the website. Product informa-tion is retrieved from Movex/M3, images are retrieved from the image bank and can be linked to documents, such as drawings or instructions concerning the product.

Such a powerful system at the founda-tion requires that everything to be in the right place and with the right relationships, otherwise the consequences are imme-diate. “I think that’s a good thing. We want to deliver information in the right way at the right time. If something in the information is managed incorrectly, we can see the error immediately and can fix it on the spot within the system, instead of trying to fix it across different sites and, in the end, still not being sure that we have fixed the pro-blem in every place it occurs. The website becomes a kind of general indicator of how well we’re keeping things in order.”

Seen UDK Grow Over the Years Pettersson, who is Marketing Communications Manager at Benders, feels that UDK has made Benders’ successful solution possible. “I’ve worked with UDK for four years—since I started at Benders—and I think they’ve grown a lot during this time. Today, they are much more like strategists, rather than just being knowledgeable about their own solutions. They know our business, speak our language, and understand exactly what we need, which has allowed us to leverage the know-how of our talented staff to our website,” he says. u

For many of the products shown on Benders’ website, “good-to-have” products are also displayed further down the page, a function made possible by the company’s information logistics, which uses the PIM system C4 Contexture to feed the site with content.