The single source of truth

The Hamelin Group is a European market leader in the field of manufacturing school and office products. Its products and brands - such as Oxford, Canson, Elba, Conquerant and Unilux – provide support not only for schools and businesses, but also private individuals and artists.

As the first notebook manufacturer certified by the European ecolabel, Hamelin sells over 300 million notebooks in over 100 countries.

Hamelin used to collect and consolidate product information from numerous different sources. In a B2B, digital context, Hamelin’s customers came to experience an ever-greater need for product information, whether to display on their websites or to provide their end users with more customer-centric information.

The kind of data required varies based on customer requirements. Distributors might need date dimensions or units, for example, while end users might require an accurate description of the product, or even information pertaining to pictures or videos.

The information was originally stored on Excel spreadsheets. However, as demand grew managing the product data became an issue due to the lack of a tool capable of handling the information flow. This is why Hamelin decided to invest into a product information management system, or PIM.

The PIM project led Hamelin through a first digital transformation. Valtech came up with a solution that allowed Hamelin to enrich and organize not only their internal product data but also the data exchanged between distributors and distribution channels, all the while structuring it by automating workflow and communication channels.

Today, project managers work directly from the PIM. In this way, sales teams can always access the data in a simultaneous manner - and use it to create specific products catalogues through the use of inriver, or by exporting information to specific distributors via the Customer Search app.

We have chosen inRiver PIM because we wanted an easy tool to use for all of our employees, but mostly for product managers and sales teams. One of our initial issues was that we thought this would be an IT project, while a PIM connects product lifecycle from the ERP to the distribution channels. 

Laurence Teuma – International Key Account Manager Online, The Hamelin Group

The first release was implemented March 2017 in France, then July 2017 in all other Hamelin countries.

Hamelin migrated to IPMC the year after the implementation in France and all subsequent countries. Thanks to its perpetual evolution, the backlog will make it possible to continuously release new versions.