This document discusses School Specialty Inc.'s decision to implement a Product Information Management (PIM) system to replace portions of their aging ERP system. Some key points: 1. SSI is a leading educational products supplier but was struggling with an overly customized ERP, tight ecommerce integration, and outdated systems. 2. They decided to decouple key capabilities like ecommerce, product data, and customer data from the ERP to advance these areas more easily. 3. Implementing a PIM provided benefits like single product representations, ability to enrich product data flexibly, manage multiple hierarchies, improve data quality workflows, and support new ecommerce needs. 4. The Riversand

1. Provide Right Content & Better Customer
Experience with a Modern PIM
DOUG LAVELLE
IT Management Consultant

2.  Nation’s leading resource for educational products.
 Largest school supply and school furniture distributor in
the country.
 110,000 products from more than 2,000
manufacturers.
 Each of SSI’s companies is one of the top providers in
their niche educational market in the United States.
School Specialty brands address the full spectrum of educational
needs, from basic school supplies to furniture and playground
equipment, to standards-based curriculum solutions.
Overview
In the K-12 Marketplace

3.  20 years of IT/IS Management and Technical experience
 MDMCenter Implementation for School Specialty
 Lead implementation of a full ERP (Infor M3) solution for
OtterBox
 Over 9 years with Staples/Corporate Express as the
Director IS Contract Systems, responsible for leading the
development and architecture groups of e-Commerce,
PDM, ERP, SFA, Process Architecture and Technical
Architecture DOUG LAVELLE
IT Management Consultant
Overview

4. Managing product data with an ERP is not feasible
for a customer obsessed enterprise
Highly customized ERP implementation
- unnecessary applications and no longer supported
- 61% of ERP implementations take longer than expected.
- 74.1% of ERP projects exceed budget.
Tight Ecommerce integration
- Limited product representation
- not enough to cater to different requirements
Outdated platform
- Difficult to maintain and costly to change
- Multiple legacy systems used in Federal government which
are more than 50 years old.
Business has to perform manual process &
procedures
Not enough checks or process control
ERPEnterprise Resource
Planning
CRM & Sales
Customer Web Portal
Distribution
Time & Projects
Dashboards
Finance
Purchasing
Manufacturing
1. http://blog.datixinc.com/blog/erp-implementation-stats
2. http://www.nextgov.com/cio-briefing/2016/05/10-oldest-it-systems-
federal-government/128599/
Customer experience for internal and external
resources is negatively impacted

5. ELT
Acquisitions
never fully
integrated
Weak
Economy
Overly
customized
ERP, tight
eCommerce
integration
The Perfect
Storm
*Panorama ERP Study
School Specialty Story
 Rebuild SSI Culture
 Build customer
connections
 Grow Revenue

6. School Specialty Decision
De-couple many key capabilities from the ERP
 Ecommerce
 Product Information
 Customer Information
 Salesforce automation
Provide much needed advancements while decreasing the
footprint and complexity of an aging ERP

7. PIM Fit in the SSI Enterprise
Supply Publish
ERP
Images
PIM
Critical Path
Management
Develop
Video
Ext.
Source
e-store
Print
Mobile
Web
Enrich
Translate
Classify

8. PIM
Enriched Content with PIM
 Change data means change
code and QA – Costly
 Single representation –
Hinder ability to modify
customer facing attributes
 Flexibility to enrich items
with more attributes
with configurations
 Agile
 Author data for
ecommerce engine
ERP

9. PIM
Multiple Hierarchies with PIM
 Complex to manage
different representations &
categorizations
 Different requirements for
Finance, Sales, Ecommerce
 Internal teams competing for
their view
 Create different hierarchies
as per requirements and
manage products within
PIM
 Ecommerce hierarchy
 Print hierarchy
 Finance hierarchy
ERP

10. PIM
Data Quality & Workflow with PIM
 Little visibility of incomplete
data
 No workflow
 Complex Batch jobs
 Not tuned for new
ecommerce requirements
 No ability to assign roles by
item attribute
 Visibility into data accuracy
 Validation at data entry
 Visibility of the incomplete
data to the right people
 Simplified & automated jobs
 Queue for merchants for
items they have to work on
ERP

11.  Know your business requirements from
each department
 Capabilities & functionality centric
approach
 Objectify your business goals
This is NOT solely a technology decision, it MUST be made in
partnership with the organizations that will utilize the
system!
How do you choose your PIM

12. How do you make the
implementation a success
 Multiple mini UAT’s
 Agile course correction
 Train business users
 Phased Implementation - Better ROI
Partnering with the business users throughout the UAT’s is
key to their buy-in and the implementations success!

13.  Lower TCO & quick time to market
 Single unified web based interface
 Smart sheet capability
 Look at product data from quality metric perspective
 Multi Domain functionality – extend similar ecosystem to
products and customers
Riversand aligned with SSI on the philosophy of flexible multiple UAT’s which
helped in making the project successful and achieve our business objectives.
SSI Riversand PIM Solution