About WAGO
Founded in Germany in 1951, WAGO has become a leading global manufacturer of electrical and industrial automation products, supplying to some of the largest distributors worldwide. With innovation at the heart of everything they do, WAGO’s end-user customers count on the unconditional performance and reliability of their products to ensure the safe, efficient operation of their systems every time.
Business Challenges
Over the last 70-plus years, WAGO has built a reputation for trailblazing innovative new technology in the market, and for valuing efficiency in both their products and their processes. So it’s no surprise, as they have evolved to meet the changing demands of the market, that they saw a need to improve upon their product content delivery solution.
Anyone familiar with WAGO knows they spend a great deal of time building exceptional content to help market, sell and support their products. But with such an extensive network of distribution partners around the world, getting new and updated product information to all their distributors had presented some significant challenges for everyone involved.
As is common in the distribution industry, there seemed to be excessive delays in getting content displayed (or updated) on most of WAGO’s partner websites. WAGO knew this delay was largely due to each partner having to spend a significant amount of time transforming their product file—as well as those of all their other suppliers—into the specific format required for uploading into their individual webstore platform. Unfortunately, this process had to be done by each individual distributor, every time new or updated content was received.
While some of their larger distributors had more resources to accomplish this more quickly, smaller ones lagged behind.
In light of this difficult, manual, and seemingly incessant process, many of their partners had begun asking for WAGO’s product file in essentially a custom format—or multiple formats— based on their unique e-commerce platform (and other business system) requirements. In an attempt to fulfill these requests to improve the usability and speed of their content, this became a time-consuming process for WAGO internally, again prolonging the time it took to get content up on each partner’s website.
With a growing number of ad hoc requests causing a strain on internal resources, the need to deliver usable data efficiently to all of their distributors, large and small, was starting to seem like an insurmountable task.
WAGO knew they needed to reduce the “launch time” of new products to their distributors by providing more accurate content feeds and minimizing ad hoc requests.
Finding a better system would also allow smaller distributors to have the same access to content as their larger counterparts with more resources.
Why WAGO Chose DDS
With a large distributor base in the U.S., WAGO was also providing their content to one of the electrical industry’s “official” data sources, which had long been the primary facilitator of ERP (a.k.a. basic transactional) data between select manufacturers and distributors. However, like many of their peer manufacturers, WAGO had become increasingly frustrated with the limitations on the amount and types of content that this provider’s legacy database technologies could host, which resulted in only partial product information being passed along to those distributors subscribing to the service. (And for those WAGO distributors not subscribed to the service, WAGO had to find an entirely different delivery method altogether.)
Obviously, this resulted in additional frustrations for their distribution channels in getting complete and current data.
As a major supplier to Mayer, Anixter, Codale Electric Supply, Newark Electronics, and so many others, WAGO couldn’t trust “just anyone” to supply these partners with accurate, updated and rich content that represents their products with all the market-differentiating features and messaging that WAGO intended, so they needed a provider who could help them ensure the best possible experience for the end user.
Most importantly, WAGO understood that if end customers couldn’t find sufficient information on their products online during their research and procurement efforts, they would likely search for other products—perhaps those of their competitors—where more detail was available.
Based on these complicated and mounting challenges, and true to their reputation as being innovators in their field and always delivering reliable products, WAGO realized they needed to carry those same standards into their content delivery.
WAGO approached DDS in their search for a better way to syndicate their data to multiple partners around the world, in a format that would work for each partner’s platform, and without all the time- and resource-intensive manipulation of data that obstructed the process along the way.
Results
With some of the most robust and detailed technical product information we’ve seen, WAGO is clearly committed to delivering high-quality, e-commerce-ready content efficiently and consistently across their channel.
Immediately upon starting to work with DDS, WAGO noticed some stark differences in the quality and volume of their content being delivered to partners. Because of DDS’ unique approach to ingesting manufacturer content (using a custom ingestion process specific to each manufacturer or product line, which literally allows us to consume unlimited types and amounts of content), we are able to pass along more of the rich information and assets they had produced, but that didn’t “fit” in other providers’ standard, rigid database templates.
Where other data sources have limits on the number and kinds of images, videos and documents they can store and pass along, DDS has no such limits, making thousands of additional assets newly available to WAGO’s distributors upon their very first data feeds with us.
On the other end, we help WAGO provide content to each of their distribution partners in the specific format that each needs for their unique e-commerce platform, virtually eliminating any post-manipulation of files on their part prior to uploading to their site.
In addition, DDS’ syndication solution delivers WAGO product content to each partner via automated, scheduled exports, all of which helps them get content displayed on their e-commerce sites in a fraction of the time it would take both WAGO’s and its distributors’ internal teams to do this manually.
Another unique and critical aspect of our SYNDICATION/io service, we automate both the ingestion and the delivery of WAGO’s content so that we automatically pick up any content updates as soon as WAGO makes them available, instantly adding them to each partner’s weekly scheduled feed. No more ad hoc exchanges necessary.
WAGO is delighted with DDS’ SYNDICATION/io service.
- They are able to provide all of their rich content—without limits—for passing along to distributors, resulting in vastly improved data available to each.
- They have significantly reduced their time to market for getting new and updated product information to distributors consistently, and through much simpler processes for both their internal teams and those of their partners.
- This has also allowed all partners, large and small, equal access to complete and accurate product content in a usable, web-ready format.
DDS is helping WAGO successfully deliver content to more than 15 distribution partners in North America, with dozens more under way.
Since successfully partnering with DDS in their North American distribution channels, WAGO is now looking to expand their partnership globally by delivering to all their distribution channels in Europe and Asia as well.
Having this data on our website allows us to provide customers with solutions and answers quickly, without having to fall back on multiple data resources. This is especially beneficial when working with products like terminal blocks that can have 100 or more accessories.
– Authorized WAGO Distributor