Alfa Laval streamlines global product catalog and digital customer journeys

At a glance:

• Industrials
• B2B
• Enterprise
• Lund, Sweden

€4 Bn

Annual Revenue

17,500+

Employees

100+

Countries Served

Summary

Alfa Laval is a global leader in heat transfer, separation, and fluid handling technology. It operates in 100+ countries, has 17,500+ employees, and has an annual revenue exceeding €4 billion. 

As its digital ecosystem expanded, managing a vast, technically complex product portfolio across spreadsheets and siloed systems created inefficiencies and slowed time-to-market. 

By implementing Inriver, Alfa Laval unified all product information into a single source of truth, automating updates and ensuring accuracy across web, sales, and partner platforms. This connected data foundation enables faster collaboration, consistent product information, and enhanced digital customer experience worldwide. 

I often talk about ‘one-and-done’ when it comes to PIM. It means that you add or make changes once, in a single place, and then it is published in all different channels. In the end, you have the same information everywhere, regardless of touchpoint. It’s like inriver is a very good airport. We put information in and then the system funnels it to the right place. For us at Alfa Laval, this wasn’t really achievable before.

Hans Troiza, Head of Online Sales, Alfa Laval

Challenge

In 2012, the leaders at Alfa Laval recognized customer demands for better online sales services. Without a streamlined digital customer journey, they risked losing market share to competitors that were modernizing their offerings. This realization kick-started a two-year project to create a common product catalog that could support the entire customer base. But the project proved easier said than done.

With such a deep product portfolio offered at a global scale, Alfa Laval’s internal taxonomy presented unique product information challenges. The massive Excel spreadsheet that the product information management team had always used wouldn’t be able to support the new digital customer journey that the company was building.

Alfa Laval knew it was time to make a change to its product information practices.

Solution

When searching for a new product information management system, Alfa Laval found that too many offerings were one-off solutions—they checked off one requirement but fell short on so many others. Soon, inriver emerged as the perfect partner with abilities to handle complex internal taxonomy, provide great performance in a cloud-based package, and unify the product catalog to support a streamlined digital customer journey.

With inriver, Alfa Laval has a PIM system sitting in the middle of vast information flow, handling all online products and assortments. It acts as the hub between the knowledge center, taxonomy, master data, and all the assets, directing a single version of truth for the entire Alfa Laval product catalog across a variety of digital channels.

Result

Ultimately, inriver acts as a bridge between Alfa Laval’s internal product attributes and the needs of its customers. Now that there’s a system connecting the dots and orchestrating all product information flow from master data management and asset management all the way to the customer experience, the digital sales team at Alfa Laval is able to understand the context for individual customers and deliver the most relevant information in real-time.

With the help of inriver, Alfa Laval has adapted digital solutions to simplify the customer journey. One example is an online product guide that provides an intuitive interface for users to enter duty-specific parameters and narrow down results to find the perfect solutions within a massive, ever-growing database of products. None of this would be possible without an effective way to digitize the product catalog and maintain quality at scale.