As a leading global manufacturer of pneumatic and electrical automation technology, SMC recognised early on that future-proof product and corporate communications can only succeed with a holistic approach and an equally holistic system landscape. The necessary concept was developed with the help of infolox.
Completely revamping product and corporate communications is a real challenge for a Japan-based corporation with a global and decentralised marketing and sales organisation.
Therefore, the European core team at SMC entrusted with this task – consisting of marketing and IT staff – decided to bring in neutral expertise at an early stage. Thus, INFOLOX was brought on board as an experienced consultant right at the start of the project. On the way to developing an overall concept, there were many typical questions that could only be dealt with professionally with the appropriate content and methodological expertise:
- What do current and future customer journeys look like?
- Which users with which market and language-specific characteristics must these be tailored to?
- What are the most important use cases, and how are they prioritised?
- Which content and functions in which channel provide optimal support for a consistent customer journey?
- Which internal roles, processes and systems must be available centrally and locally for this purpose?
- How can an appropriate system landscape be designed?
- Which old systems need to be replaced, and how is the transition to the new system landscape going?
In order to reflect on and specify these and other aspects in the context of best practice examples, INFOLOX supported the SMC team with a series of workshops. In line with the motto "System follows process follows omnichannel strategy", the most important target groups, personas, channels and touch points were analysed and modelled, and the requirements for processes and systems were derived from this, including market-specific features. Not only was the customer side taken into account, but also the internal perspective, namely which SMC department or employee role maintains, edits, translates, approves and publishes which content and metadata, in which country and in which language. On this basis, the overall architecture of a possible omnichannel system landscape and the requirements for the individual systems (PIM, MAM, CMS, SHOP, TMS, etc.) were derived and described in detail.
Automatically good – SMC's overall concept: The resulting overall system design served as the basis for SMC to evaluate existing systems on the one hand and select suitable new systems and integration partners on the other.
"The omnichannel potential analysis by INFOLOX and the associated workshops and discussions have helped us greatly in bringing our national organisations up to the same level as the parent company and clarifying where we need to go. This has greatly simplified communication internally and with potential partners worldwide."
Christian Ziegler, Head of Marketing & Product Management at SMC Deutschland GmbH
