How Harman Grew Global Operational Efficiency for Ecommerce Success

Harman International Industries, a subsidiary global company Samsung Electronics, makes audio and visual products under several brand names around the world. With over 50 ecommerce sites, the company’s success hinges on its ability to empower its global teams to customize brand assets for each market and brand.

“With people all over the world, we needed to have one source of data at the product level that anyone who needed to could access,” says Arthur  Werner, Director of Global Ecommerce and Operations for Harman International. “We had an aging PIM which had stability issues and could no longer support our internal needs correctly. The outdated software made progress difficult. We had 25 feeds of product information, all of them changing regularly.”

Implementing a New PIM in Two Months

Harman became a Salsify customer at the end of April 2016 to support these initiatives and was able to dramatically speed time to market and increase the accuracy of their content worldwide.

The Salsify implementation process for Arthur and his team was incredibly fast and successful - due largely to teamwork within the Salsify- Harman relationship. Harman’s ecommerce team was live with all product content in June 2016. By July 5, the Harman direct-to-consumer feed to Salesforce Commerce Cloud was complete and operational.

The company-wide transparency for product content has led to a lot of data enrichment. Many people throughout the organization have access-only views and they can see exactly what content is in place. For example, if someone from Harman's marketing team looks into the system and only sees three images for a product when there are an additional two available, that team member can alert the team and provide the missing images to be added.  In addition, the company can translate English to more than 25 different languages with Salsify. 

Leveraging a PIM for the Digital Shelf

PIMs must allow IT to extend governance across each endpoint along the digital shelf. Business users’ need to have the ability to access or manage content needed without compromising data security. Operations teams can’t provide the required data quality to your organization at scale if your system is architected for a single version of truth. Learn more about how Salsify’s approach to PIM is purpose-built for the digital shelf.