Case study: Building Value Through Master Data Management

He is referring to the ebuild.com website, where building professionals throughout the residential construction industry can find a comprehensive, interactive online catalog that makes researching and comparing construction products of all kinds fast and easy.

Published by Washington, DC-based Hanley Wood e-Media, the leading media company in the residential construction industry, the ebuild website was created by and for building professionals so that they could easily navigate the diversity of building products available and quickly zero in on the ideal product to satisfy any situation – all in just a few mouse clicks. The popularity of the website has increased steadily since its inception. “In fact,” says Stevens, “we now average 310,000 web visits each month.”

Soon after the website opened, ebuild realized the need to more efficiently manage the high volume of dynamic product information offered in its catalog. “The time had come for a sophisticated master data management tool,” says Stevens.

ebuild is not an e-commerce site; you cannot purchase products there. It is a business-to-business website that serves as a comprehensive guide to building products and specifications, manufacturer information and news about building products – giving building professionals a central source to find, compare, evaluate and store product information. It includes everything needed to make informed selections on the thousands of products that comprise the US$350 billion building-products industry – from diagrams and descriptions to installation specifics, product reviews and supplier locators. And for the nearly 300 building-product manufacturers who sponsor the website, ebuild provides an immediate opportunity to connect with customers at the moment of their buying decisions. “We have more than 300,000 products that we are actively managing right now,” explains Stevens. “And we have 300-plus categories of products, with anywhere from 5-30 attributes per product. There is no way you could manage that much data without a master data management tool.”

But in 2001, when ebuild began, it did not have the master data management tool it needed to support the growing catalog. ebuild devised its own set of Microsoft Excel macros to enable data imports, and it optimized its processes down to a few tables. This workaround would allow some data management of the website, but it was a clumsy solution. “If we wanted to manage data, we had to export it to a spreadsheet, edit it, then reimport it back to the database. There wasn’t any way to really manage data in the database,” Stevens explains. In addition, images were kept in separate files and it was easy for things to get lost.

To continue augmenting its magazine exposure, advertising and marketing efforts, ebuild required a strong, robust master data management solution with the power to increase efficiencies, reduce costs and improve the data quality of its electronic-catalog creation and data-maintenance processes. The company considered a number of solutions, but the master data management solution from SAP was the clear choice. “SAP NetWeaver Master Data Management (MDM) gives us the flexibility we need,” he says. The master data management functionality of the platform is designed to easily manage content for a high volume of SKUs from numerous manufacturers. It supports fast product-information updates and edits, as well as quick, error-free taxonomy modifications – both essential in meeting ebuild’s specific requirements.

The implementation of SAP NetWeaver MDM began in June of 2002. “The first phase was converting our existing catalog, our database, into the new tool, followed by getting our team up to speed and using the tool to do all their data entry,” Stevens says. “The database conversion was completed in mid-July and all the users were trained and using the solution by September of 2002.” The second phase – interfacing the new solution with the actual website itself – was a bit trickier. “It took some adjustments to get things the way we wanted them, but we were fully up and running on the new system by December of 2002.”

The implementation met all of ebuild’s MDM project objectives and equipped it to efficiently manage its catalog content requirements. SAP NetWeaver MDM quickly replaced ebuild’s legacy solution with a robust solution capable of creating, editing and posting content for hundreds of thousands of SKUs from hundreds of manufacturers. In one case, soon after the implementation, the solution was able to refresh some 27,000 products from a single manufacturer in less than half the time it would have taken with ebuild’s old system. And with SAP NetWeaver MDM, the modifications to ebuild product taxonomies became easy to achieve.

The indisputable business benefit of implementing SAP NetWeaver MDM at ebuild shows up in the bottom line. The reduced data-acquisition costs offered by the solution have resulted in a
US$250,000 savings in SKU preparation expense in the first year – down from US$19 to $10.50 per SKU. This initial saving was followed by another dramatic decrease to just US$5.90 in 2005. Adding to these cost savings are the time savings achieved through streamlined processes and data unification, which result in much more rapid data updating than was previously possible at ebuild. “As our catalog has grown, we not only enter new products, but we also maintain existing products, and we try to refresh our data once a year,” says Stevens. “As a result, we’ve actually been able to keep our catalog up-to-date with a smaller staff than we had before. With these tools, it makes it very easy to update our data,” he adds.

Before the implementation, it was difficult and time-consuming to make changes to the catalog. Stevens explains: “When a new type of product was introduced – for example, a new type of glass window with embedded fiber for hurricane protection – it would take a lot of work to add the new product to our database, including rebuilding indexes and having to synchronize the database. Now, it just takes minutes.”

Finally, when asked why the implementation was worth the cost, Stevens has this to say: “With SAP NetWeaver MDM, we’ve gone from three managers to one senior-level manager by delegating more authority to data-entry staff to do things like data cleanup. The savings plus efficiencies we’ve been able to make – yes, there’s no question about it, this has definitely been well worth it.”