A PIM on Magnolia CMS for the Design catalog: what the ERP cannot carry

An ERP manages a product as a business unit: code, stock, cost. It is not built to sell it. That difference, which sounds minor, defines how a record looks in the store.

Softland manages each product with a single description field, with no commercial name and no short description, so the published record ended up inheriting that same text for the name, the slug, the meta title and the meta description.

On a building materials catalog, that leaves out exactly what drives the purchase.

• One text for everything: the same administrative field doing four different jobs on the record, serving none of them well.
• No specs of its own: the technical characteristics of the material had nowhere to live.
• Inherited SEO: each record's search fields filled themselves in with the ERP text.

Extending the ERP was not the answer: the problem is not that it lacks fields, it is that it manages something else.

We implemented Magnolia CMS as the catalog PIM, on an internal management instance with no public front end, separating two responsibilities that usually get mixed.

The ERP manages the product as a business unit and the PIM manages how that product is presented and sold.

An information model built to sell

• Commercial name and short and long descriptions as independent fields, not one reused text.
• Technical specifications specific to building materials and finishes.
• SEO fields per record: meta title, meta description and slug, editable one by one.
• Media associated with the product.

Publishing to the store

• Enriched information is delivered over API to the PrestaShop ecommerce.
• The published record is composed from PIM data rather than from a direct ERP dump.
• Management covers the full catalog with its category and subcategory structure, the same hierarchy the Softland integration syncs.

One source for the whole company

• The system also stands as the product information source for internal processes, beyond store publishing.

Architecture and technology

• Magnolia CMS as PIM, on an internal management instance with no public front end.
• API delivery to the PrestaShop ecommerce.
• Coexistence with catalog sync from the Softland ERP.

Learn more about Magnolia for catalog and commerce.

Learn more about software development y digital marketing.

The catalog went from inheriting an administrative field to having a record built to sell, on a single source.

Starting point

• A single ERP description field doing four jobs on the record.
• No commercial name, short description, technical specs or SEO fields of its own.

Results

• 960 catalog products managed from the PIM.
• Every category and subcategory under centralized management.
• Four families of enriched attributes per record: name and descriptions, technical specs, SEO fields and media.
• One source of product information for ecommerce and for internal processes.

Strategic impact

• Each record can be optimized on its own without touching the ERP or another team's work.
• The company no longer has product information split across systems that do not share it.