Customer spotlight story: Prysmian Group

In the heart of the global cable manufacturing industry, Prysmian Group stands as an unrivaled leader, offering an extensive array of products, services, technologies, and expertise that shape the world’s power transmission, distribution, construction, and infrastructure sectors.

Prysmian Group crafts thousands of miles of underground and submarine cables and systems, alongside medium and low-voltage cables, making their mark as an essential force in connecting societies around the globe. However, this endeavor comes with its own set of intricate challenges, especially considering the complexity of their products and the diverse commercial applications they serve.

One of their biggest challenges before using the inriver PIM solution was managing their vast range of products, each with its distinct operational, logistical, and commercial nuances. Cables that might share manufacturing processes could vary greatly in terms of their intended commercial purposes, changing their use in different markets. This complexity resulted in a disconnection of product data needs between operational and commercial teams, which hindered the communication of product information across the globe.

Watch the video featuring Giuliano Abdelmalek, IT PIM owner at Prysmian Group, as he shares the key drivers behind choosing the inriver PIM solution as their central repository to harmonize product data for operational, logistical, and commercial purposes at global scale:

• A flexible data model able to accommodate their intricate variations in product data
• A singular repository, seamlessly integrating operational, logistical, and commercial data
• Ability to handle complex product categorizations based on distinct commercial applications, enhancing market relevance
• Capability to enrich the data model with sustainability attributes, spotlighting environmental responsibility for customers

Some of the advantages Prysmian Group gained from using the inriver PIM solution are: direct access to accurate product information and data sheets empowering the sales teams and accelerating time-to-market products at global scale.

Prysmian Group’s implementation journey

As a public company, Prysmian creates innovative products and delivers groundbreaking projects while demonstrating ethical and transparent governance practices and implementing strong sustainability policies. But with millions of products, different suppliers, and partners, showcasing this was challenging at the product-level. Prysmian started to embed sustainability data in their PIM (ie Eco Cable Labels) and are planning to enhance this approach further in future.

Always a visionary, Prysmian is guided by three pillars in all they do:

• Energy transition- to help world transition to a new source of energy
• Digitalization –  to advance the digitalization of the world
• Sustainability – to consider the environment and society

Thanks to the PIM, now we have a single source of truth, a single platform that collects all our product information so now we can talk the same business language. With inriver, we can now apply best practices to our product data to drive our business.

Stefano Brandinali, Chief Digital and Information Officer | Prysmian Group

challenge

The Prysmian Group is the global industry leader in the cable industry, dedicated to innovation in products and a focus on quality. As in most large organizations, Prysmian had different systems and technologies to manage their vast amounts of product data.

With millions of different products and hundreds of sales and distribution channels, they needed a platform that allowed them to manage both technical data and commercial data, such as short descriptions, long descriptions, certifications, videos, pictures, branding, and other information.

It was challenging because product information was characterized and described in different ways, on different IT systems, and on spreadsheets and data sheets. This dispersed information was difficult to manage efficiently and deliver to all their different sales channels. Additionally, with rapid growth in digital commerce, Prysmian’s business to business customers had new requirements. They were asking for clarity of data, completeness of information, and fresh, usable product information to run their e-commerce sites efficiently.

The organization started their digital transformation journey in 2017, anticipating how the evolving demands of digital commerce would impact their teams, partners, and industry at large. Prysmian invested in the product information management solution from inriver as a foundation for their commerce strategy. They spent ten months building a new, robust data model to serve the dynamic onboarding needs of different countries and product lines. Scalability was essential for the Prysmian team. Without a flexible data model, future requirements would be difficult to meet and would impact growth.

Integrating the PIM solution in our IT landscape is helping us to have a more structured and harmonized way to describe our product information. This helps our customers uncover and leverage the value behind our product data. We searched for a platform that would give us the ability to collect, to manage, and to enrich all our product information. This included translations of product information into different languages to scale to different countries across different channels.

Mona Mohamed, Senior IT Business Partner Energy & Communications/Prysmian Group

solution

Inriver’s platform is SaaS-based and helped ensure the reliability and ease of use integrating different systems and technologies across the Prysmian ecosystem. This became especially important as teams worked remotely for extended periods of time. Ease of use and accessibility were essential during the pandemic. Another advantage of the inriver solution was that global teams could be built and trained on the new processes around PIM. This helped keep user adoption high and maintain a consistent level of knowledge for teams.

Change management is never easy, but with the ability to train and transfer knowledge about inriver, global rollouts became faster and more effective. 

The solid data model and qualitative data allows consistency through all the channels that we have with our customers and in the market. It also allows increased speed when you want to communicate, because you have one source of information that you can export in many different ways: ie Datasheets, Web Catalogues, BMCat exportx, html and more

Francesca Novelli, Customer Centricity & International Key Account Senior Manager / Prysmian Group

result

Prysmian now had a stable and scalable system for their online products using inriver. The original plan to cover only standard business was changed during the PIM project implementation. To date, inriver is used not only for standard cables, but also for data cables as well as specials. Inriver is live in 20 countries in Europe and in 2021 will be part of the expansion in North America. The rest of the world will follow in 2022 in terms of geographies and businesses. In addition to the project implementation – the central PIM Team is onboarding and transferring the technical and processes knowledge to the extended Prysmian PIM teams to optimize efficiency.

“We enhanced our brand awareness on the market, and overall, we were able to increase the loyalty of our customers, and improve the customer experience for customers who are dealing with Prysmian and its commercial brands,” said Novelli.

The Prysmian Group today has a scalable data model and flexible platform that enabled resilience during the pandemic and market growth while maintaining a commitment to their mission and customers. That’s the way to lead an industry.