Company Overview
Bosch USA is a regional branch of the Bosch Group, one of the world’s largest private industrial corporations. The
company is divided into three corporate divisions: Automotive Technology, Consumer Goods and Building Technology,
and Industrial Technology. Bosch USA has annual sales of $6.8 billion and has 25,000 employees.
Synopsis
The Robert Bosch PowerTools division contains four major departments representing product brands. Each brand contains
power tools, attachments, and accessories. There are approximately 7,000 SKUs that are active.
The products are maintained in a legacy Product Information Management (PIM) system originally deployed in 2001.
The PIM associates marketing information and imagery for products. The IT department developed a system extract
process and web service to make the PIM data accessible to the public-facing brand web sites.
The legacy PIM system contains several critical deficiencies that prevent it from maximizing product management
productivity as well as not meeting new business requirements. Some of the issues include:
- Difficulty in bulk editing product and images. Often work takes hours to individually assign changes to products.
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Legacy system does not support multi-lingual data storage. Each department wants to provide language and region
web sites with consolidated data management.
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Data quality is managed through business process and not enforced by the system. Data types are constraints are
impossible because all data is text.
Bosch and Triton-Tek worked together to determine the current and future needs of a PIM solution. This effort led to
an analysis of several products as well as developing a custom solution. After an examination of the current market
and taking into account the business and technical landscape, Bosch chose to implement the SAP MDM product.
Solution
Triton-Tek worked with Bosch to identify SAP MDM as the solution that met the project needs. SAP MDM is a master data
management system that also has the abilities to manage product data.
SAP MDM (Master Data Management) is a product that is well suited to master data scenarios as well as product
management scenarios. The SAP MDM solution provided the following capabilities:
- Data import and export
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Multi-lingual data capability along with a language inheritance system. This system allows for partial language
data to be entered and inherit base language data where there is no derived language data entered.
- Access to a programming interface to retrieve data for use with Bosch’s web sites.
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Strong repository modeling capabilities to increase data quality. Features include integer, text fields, images,
and lists.
Triton-Tek performed several different services in the deployment of the PIM solution.
- Data repository design: Development of a structure to store power tools data.
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Data import: Extracting data from the legacy system and importing as much data as possible into the new
solution.
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Interface Development: Create a web service using the SAP MDM Java API that is accessible to Bosch’s
.NET web sites.
Triton-Tek helped design the original prototype and final repository to model power tools product information data.
Extensive work was done to ensure that modeling incorporated all existing PIM data fields with increased data
constraints where appropriate. As many data elements as possible were constrained to valid values. Consultation
with SAP services was also done to ensure the model was valid for the product.
Data importing was incrementally performed from the existing PIM to the new SAP MDM system as data elements completed
modeling. This allowed for iterative functionality testing to ensure that data was valid and SAP MDM was usable by
the product managers. Extensive ETL work was done to reshape the legacy PIM data for import into SAP MDM.
Triton-Tek then worked to develop a web service that would be consumed by Bosch’s web sites for presentation of PIM
data to customers. Triton-Tek developed a web service interface that allowed the web sites to use the new SAP MDM
system without changes to the web sites. The new SAP MDM web service implemented the interface that the legacy
system’s custom-built web service used. Then work was done to translate and transform inbound requests into SAP
MDM Java API calls. The returned data is reformatted to a canonical form before return to the web site requesting
data.
The SAP MDM web service was developing in .NET using Bosch’s architectural and development standards. A third party
product (JNBridge) was used to call the Java API directly from the .NET web service.
Results
The SAP MDM solution has been successfully deployed and is implemented in each department’s brand web site(s) when
the business determines a need to update and modify their web presence.
Bosch’s product managers have experienced increased productivity managing their product data. Data errors have
decreased dramatically due to data constraints implemented by the new solution.
The technical capabilities have allowed Bosch to implement multi-lingual sites without duplication of data or
technical efforts. This will yield significant savings in deployment to new markets.
Future use of the PIM data is now enabled because of increased data quality. Future projects for the SAP MDM
solution include export for product catalog creation and transfer of product data electronically to resellers.
The SAP MDM solution will require less overall management support and provide a scalable solution to create the core
of a master data project in the future as well.
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