Overview
This industry-leading manufacturer has been at the forefront of designing and distributing residential ventilation products for nearly a century, with their products found in more than 110 million homes across the United States. Like many manufacturers, they faced critical operational challenges while attempting to manually manage the growing mountains of product data within their highly complex and diverse catalog. Managing their thousands of SKUs involved sprawling spreadsheets, intensive manual efforts, and widespread reliance on individual expertise—an approach unsustainable for future growth. Partnering with Aperture Labs and Inriver PIM, this manufacturer quickly gained control over their product data, creating lasting efficiencies and paving the way for future growth and innovation.
The Challenge
With no central source of truth for product data, the manufacturer managed diverse product lines through a massive, unwieldy spreadsheet. Onboarding products to retail partner sites was particularly labor-intensive, taking approximately 30 minutes per product. Additionally, mapping replacement parts to finished products was virtually impossible due to the complexity and volume of the data, making customer support difficult.
Challenging the situation even further, the manufacturer had attempted to implement two different PIMs in the past but was unable to garner the necessary internal adoption of the tools to make them effective.
They needed a PIM that was capable of handling their complex enterprise data needs, scalable enough to handle their future growth, yet intuitive enough for their internal team to gladly use and adopt.
Enter Aperture Labs and Inriver.
The Solution
The manufacturer partnered with Aperture Labs to implement Inriver PIM, fundamentally transforming their approach to product data. With Aperture Labs’ expertise, they successfully transitioned to a highly efficient, centralized management system that unlocked immediate operational advantages, including:
Unified product data repository: All departments—including marketing, engineering, and product management—now access, contribute to, and maintain product data within a single intuitive system, ensuring accuracy, consistency, and real-time updates.
Efficient data distribution: Product data now automatically flows via FTP directly to the manufacturer's web team, eliminating manual steps previously performed by their ecommerce team. Approved product changes are seamlessly integrated, enhancing efficiency and accuracy.
Accelerated product onboarding: The previous painstaking process of onboarding new products was dramatically improved—from 30 minutes per individual product down to just 1 minute per product (15 minutes for batches of 15 products). This newfound speed empowered the manufacturer’s teams to rapidly scale their product lines through retailer channels.
Parts mapping and management: Inriver allows the manufacturer to accurately associate parts with their respective finished products, simplifying replacement part identification for customer service representatives and significantly improving customer support operations. They can now clearly identify active versus inactive parts and manage version updates systematically, eliminating reliance on individual legacy knowledge.
Rapid DAM integration: Aperture Labs’ pre-built connector to Widen DAM meant this crucial integration was complete in just two days, far exceeding expectations.
Results and Impact
With a powerful single source of truth for all product information, the manufacturer transformed a once tangled web of data into an efficient data model with governance and workflows that allow them to get products to market faster.
The manufacturer’s PIM lead stated “we’re impressed by the intuitive nature of the Inriver interface, which makes it easy for even occasional users to quickly navigate and contribute.”
Partnering with Aperture Labs to implement Inriver, they have realized benefits that surpassed their own expectations, including:
“Everything about working with Aperture Labs has been extremely positive. The entire team has been helpful, insightful, and instrumental in guiding us through every challenge. Aperture Labs’ deep Inriver expertise and large catalog of existing extensions allowed us to realize immediate gains in efficiency."
–Manufacturer’s PIM owner/lead
Looking Ahead
Seeing the significant operational and GTM improvements Inriver has unlocked for them, this ventilation manufacturer is motivated to continue expanding their use of the platform over time. And between Inriver’s continual release of new features and Aperture Labs’ ever-growing library of client-ready Inriver customizations and extensions, the opportunities for them to continue extracting value out of their investment are unmatched.
If you're dealing with similar challenges, the team at Aperture Labs is here to help. Reach out to speak to one of our experts!