Our work with Howdens

Howdens Joinery is the UK’s largest manufacturer and supplier of fitted kitchens, appliances and joinery products.

THE PROBLEM

Howdens realised that they were having to exert a huge effort into manual input to create the majority of their marketing material such as brochures, fliers, and website information.

The master source of their product information was in PDF form, or solely on the website, which then had to be manually transferred for any marketing purposes.

They wanted to implement a PIM system to create a master source of product information from a marketing collateral perspective, the idea being that they could automate the majority of their advertising material without this need for manual input.

WHAT WE DID

We selected STEP as both a PIM tool and a Digital Asset Management tool. Alongside Stibo Systems we introduced fully governed processes and work flows to manage the creation and management of product data.

We repeated this with regards to all product assets and created print templates in order to automate as much of the brochure creation process as possible. A huge data migration effort was also undertaken as all master sources of data were in PDF format, with up to 15 sources of data for the same product.

Alongside this, we ran a business change initiative with Howdens to embed the new processes and policies into their organisation by setting up a Data Quality Organisation.

THE OUTCOME

The Data Quality Organisation now has the capability to ensure that new Data Quality routines could be built and managed in house. This has resulted in the identification of over 40,000 live data issues which have now been fixed.
On top of this the new STEP Data Model and workflows support quicker product launch processes, with integrated data through to both their web and print marketing channels.
This has led to a huge reduction in data maintenance for Howdens resulting in both monetary and time savings, and a marked increase in data quality and consistency across all channels.