VIPAR Heavy Duty’s recent product data platform upgrade accomplished three major goals:
- A more user-friendly PARTSPHERE PIM, with enhanced search and filter functionality to more easily navigate its 1.2 million parts.
- A robust PARTSPHERE DAM to efficiently access 1.4 million supplier-provided visual assets.
- A categorization refinement to better organize parts and enhance customers' e-commerce experiences.
PARTSPHERE PIM was originally launched in 2019 to provide streamlined access to and delivery of highly-sought product data. VIPAR Heavy Duty identified early on that good data builds accuracy and efficiency, and affects many different areas within a distributor's business including sales, training, inventory, shipping and delivery.
VIPAR Heavy Duty Vice President of Marketing Jeff Paul notes the heavy-duty industry has made great strides in providing access to product rich data over the last five years.
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Most of the challenge is in creating an efficient way to exchange and communicate product information between suppliers and distributors, he says. Naturally, Paul says suppliers want to be in control of their intellectual data, and how it is shared by distributors to end users. In turn, distributors want to receive that data with specific standards so it can be uploaded to whatever platform they are using — for e-commerce or as part of their business system, for example.
VIPAR states distributors report that acquiring and organizing product data including descriptions, images, interchanges, and attributes, is a major undertaking, as it comes from suppliers in various formats. Some have even taken thousands of photos of parts themselves to use in their e-commerce platforms. Many suppliers have responded by working with VIPAR Heavy Duty's Content Services Team to actively build new product data and review existing data within the platform, the company says.
“This upgrade and development are the result of feedback we received directly from our distributors who use PARTSPHERE PIM to sell and market parts to the heavy-duty aftermarket. Their input was the driving force behind our latest platform enhancements and will help guide future development goals,” says Andrea Lily, VIPAR Heavy Duty’s manager of Content Services.
“This launch is evidence of our continued investment in PARTSPHERE solutions and the benefits to both our distributors and supplier partners. VIPAR Heavy Duty is committed to being a leader in product information management and data standardization efforts within the heavy-duty aftermarket, and we will continue to evolve our platform to best support our network,” adds Paul.
