With over 900 employees, the hostettler family business, founded in 1906, is a globally successful general importer of bicycles, motorcycles, automobiles and everything that goes with them. As the central economic engine of central Switzerland, the hostettler group is particularly important as an importer of the Yamaha motorcycle brand and as a manufacturer of the Wheeler and BiXS bicycle brands.
However, the highly successful expansion of the company over many years and the associated expansion and development of new sales channels generated growing demands on the IT infrastructure. In addition to the growing demands on the infrastructure, topics such as e-commerce were also becoming increasingly important alongside the stationary Commerce . The heart of this new IT infrastructure was therefore modern data management.
In order to enable modern data management, hostettler decided to automate substantial processes in a targeted manner in addition to renewing the IT system landscape. This included the introduction of Contentserv's PIM system, which acts as a single source of trust for product data. This is the only way to ensure that all product information is available in one place. In addition, products can be made available on different channels in a targeted manner.
Another relevant point that spoke in favor of the introduction of a modern PIM system was the additional possibility of being able to quickly and automatically onboard product data from different product data sources, both from internal catalog systems and external supplier and manufacturer catalogs.
Before the introduction of the Onedot product data platform, all products had to be prepared manually in the ERP and PIM system. This meant that hostettler employees had to invest a lot of time in assigning the right product information to the products, filling in the right attributes or providing image material for the desired products. This is one of the reasons why the hostettler group set itself the goal of significantly increasing the degree of automation of this process in the ERP and PIM system and thus investing in better product data quality at the same time. In this way, the same hostettler data team can handle much more. Because only those who can offer products quickly and in the desired e-commerce quality will win in the market.
After implementing the clearly structured AI-supported onboarding process from Onedot with core steps such as automated product categorization or attribute mapping of supplier attributes to the attributes of hostettler, the manual effort was significantly reduced. Today, items can be classified, products matched and attribute values and units automatically standardized and transferred to hostettler's desired target format. This means that this automated process not only significantly reduces manual effort during initial creation, but also greatly improves the enrichment of product data in the PIM system.
Today, hostettler has a modern, flexible and extremely strong IT infrastructure that manages around 275,000 products, 900,000 images and more than half a million references in up to four languages. This allows hostettler to remain a central economic engine in central Switzerland and to be successful in international competition.
