Matching Back-End Data Model To Innovative Front-End Experience
Wastequip became a Salsify customer in October 2019. The team at Wastequip uses Salsify to manage marketing data for their retail products and branded ecommerce experiences. Today, Salsify acts as their source of truth for marketing information — powering automation and organization of product information and digital assets — allowing the website to stay up-to-date and accurate.
Automated Inventory Process and Item Set-up From the ERP to the PIM
Wastequip connected Epicor as an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution into Salsify in 2023. They’ve built a connection for the Wastebuilt.com website that identifies the products that the company wants to sell online based on what’s sold and what’s in stock.
Each day, the team gets alerted to any new items, new vendor requests, or other necessary action items.
“I don't have to deal with any of the details. Essentially, it just shows up inside Salsify automatically and kicks off a series of workflows,” Creese says. “There are workflows to get our products classified so that they're added to our taxonomy, to get images collected from my people in my data warehouse, and to get metadata like product tags, descriptions, and keywords created.”
Salsify workflows are used to procedurally update products — tasking the right people with manual work where necessary — but automatically setting product or asset properties according to formulas, logic, or even artificial intelligence (AI) when possible. As in Wastequip’s scenario, these workflows are triggered by new or updated products, but listeners can be configured for a variety of other events that take place in the system.
Launched Shoppable Bills of Materials Diagrams on Its DTC Website
After months of discovery in 2020, Creese and his team partnered with Oro Commerce and Americaneagle.com to design an innovative DTC website capable of presenting parts from several brands with shoppable bills of materials diagrams. Salsify’s integration, workflows, and data management capabilities now play a critical role in feeding the site the digital assets and product detail required.
“When you look at our website taxonomy, it mirrors what we have stored in Salsify,” Creese says. “We know we have the structured data to pull from across maintenance operations, current operations, and body parts, and it all matches the structure for how we report revenue. Using data from Salsify and our ERP system, in conjunction with other analytical tools, we have much deeper insights into our data and the products we manufacture and sell. The automation between our ERP system, Salsify, and our website relieves a lot of the manual lifting that we used to experience with our old infrastructure, making ecommerce a lot easier to manage!”
By storing sales volume inside Salsify, Creese can prioritize the team’s to-dos. A stack ranking allows the team to take a product category and update the top-selling items first.
Creese’s team also has an ecommerce specialist, an ecommerce operations specialist, and a design engineer, who’s responsible for building each of the interactive parts drawings.
These drawings are powered by Salsify, using a data type called a “quantified product reference.” The design engineer can focus on the available parts required for a given item and map the illustration based on how those parts connect.
The resulting drawing is then exported for publication onto the website and remains automatically connected to each corresponding item page. This creates a shoppable diagram.
“Salsify is my source of truth for all data on the website,” Creese says. “Our data taxonomy is designed to create an easy-to-navigate front-end experience for our customers. In the ERP system, our sales and purchasing team are making daily decisions around what products should be live on our website based on our customers' needs. The role of our ecommerce team is to use automation to efficiently respond to the day-to-day operations of our business. Through our efforts, we have implemented passive workflows that feed the business decisions directly to our website without daily maintenance from my team.”
“I always will be a fan of Salsify [and] the people that we get to work with — the responsiveness for supporting us makes it the best platform for me. I couldn't do this without Salsify.”
— Kevin Creese, Ecommerce Manager, Wastequip
