www.c4contexture.com

BENDERS IN BRIEF

• 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 soccer 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.

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 roo-fing, 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 investment, says Benders Christer Pettersson.

Relationships Build a Powerful Site Pettersson explains that one of the benefits of having a PIM system is better data con-trol 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.

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

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.

SUCCESS STORY

C4 POWERS BENDERS ONLINE SOLUTION

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

www.c4contexture.com

With C4 Contexture you create, save and manage all your product information and you gain all conditions needed for quality sales solutions in multiple channels and in multiple languages. Our customers have the tools they need to be able to present perfect information to their markets.

product they want. Thanks to EPiServer 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 fasci-nated 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 information is retrieved from Movex/M3, images are re-trieved from the image bank and can be

does the hard work of feeding the web-site 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 possibilities 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 recom-mend 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 websi-te’s ability to adapt to the visitor’s point of entrance.

- Some visitors are looking for inspira-tion and, through our inspirational ima-ges, 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 inspiratio-nal images that help them decide which

linked to documents like drawings or in-structions concerning the product. Such a powerful system at the foundation re-quires everything to be in the right place and with the right relationships, otherwise the consequences are immediate.

- 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 problem in every place it occurs. The website becomes a kind of gene-ral indicator of how well we’re keeping things in order.

Strategists who knows the businessChrister Pettersson feels that C4 has made Benders’ successful solution possible.

- I’ve worked with C4 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 what we need, which has allowed us to leverage the know-how of our talented staff to our website,” he says.

” 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 Pettersson

Marketing Communications Manager, Benders

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..