Linking Hybris PIM to TYPO3 CMS
Kaldewei's corporate website is the heart of the family-owned company's digital communication. It is where prospective customers can access all information about the company and its product range in 14 languages. Changes are made to the configuration of the product range several times a year to incorporate new products or modified products or remove discontinued items. Previously, these changes had to be undertaken in the CMS individually for each variant in every language. This is a relatively complex process (due to the numbers of products alone) and is not sustainable in the long term.
We were therefore commissioned to link the TYPO3 CMS to a Hybris PIM. As a single source of truth (SSOT), it has information-based sovereignty over the global product range in order to make content management work more efficient. The objective was to achieve standardised product data across all channels, a reduced maintenance workload with low error rates in the CMS, fast updates in all languages, and a consistent presentation of the product range.
| Client | Franz KALDEWEI GmbH & Co. KG |
|---|---|
Project duration | 2016–2020 |
Project details
Marketing Factory was responsible for the content and technical design in this project, along with the technical realisation of the interface and quality assurance monitoring. We have acquired and documented extensive knowledge of the complex product range as we have been working for this client for many years. The project team is very familiar with its structures, features and dependencies. We were therefore able to conceptualise a detailed map together with the client, which defined the levels and fields of the PIM, and assign them to the CMS's product database.
One element of the technical implementation process involved a specially designed test instance in our infrastructure, on which we were able to track the latest status of the implementation process together. Functional and content errors could thus be quickly identified and corrected in one of the two systems or in the code itself. As a result, extensive XML data sets (text and image content) are now transferred from the PIM to the CMS every night in the languages and product range properties required for the respective countries.
Recurring queries are stored in a Redis cache to speed up the synchronisation process. This action reduced the length of the synchronisation process by half. Once synchronisation has been completed, all changes in the database are re-indexed in Solr and are immediately available on the website. The data is also directly transferred to all other digital channels that access this database. The CMS thus also acts in certain areas as a hub for other platforms.
The successful data transfer as well as any error messages (e.g. if individual languages are not available) are captured and recorded in detail in an error log. Any faults that occur during the alignment process are quickly identified and eliminated.