Full-Channel Syndication Revitalizes Schneider Electric’s Product Content Delivery – DDS

After several months (and a lot of resources) into their engagement with another content partner, Schneider recognized some technical obstacles in that partner’s process were limiting both the amount and the quality of the content that was being passed along to their distributors. They had spent a great deal of time and money producing impeccable product information, yet their data was either incomplete or “watered down” for the end-user due to the legacy technologies and processes being utilized by most of the content providers serving the industry at the time.

Schneider recognized this was a major problem that must be solved in order to continue to build successful partnerships with their channel and grow market share. They knew they needed a partner with better technology and better processes to help them navigate the challenges of a new era of commerce.

Not long into talks with DDS, Schneider knew they had found that partner. For starters, they appreciated DDS’ completely unique approach to ingesting their product content, which DDS treated distinctly from other manufacturers’. This immediately allowed more types, and more volume, of information to be passed along than what they were used to with previous content systems. Equally important, they were blown away that DDS could provide their content to each of their priority distribution partners in the precise format needed for their individual webstore platforms, further mitigating any loss of data from manual manipulation of files.

Schneider Electric’s e-commerce and data teams saw tremendous value in having DDS perform virtually all of the data management needed for the “last mile” of preparing content for integration to partner websites so that their hundreds of distributor and retail partners wouldn’t be stuck with that burden. They also knew this would speed time to market for new and updated content significantly.

In addition, both the ingestion and delivery processes would be automated and scheduled, so that any changes to Schneider’s content—which were fairly frequent, and another “wrinkle” in the overall content syndication challenge—would be picked up automatically in their weekly feed to DDS and added to each partner’s outgoing exports.

Even early in, they saw DDS as a tech-savvy company that could not only syndicate their data effectively, but also eliminate the internal manual processes they had in place, which were tedious and slow. Schneider was elated at the prospect of no longer having to worry about constantly getting their up-to-date content to their distributors by maintaining deltas, NPI and obsolete products.