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SUCCESS STORY
Garlock is a global manufacturer of high-performance sealing solutions. Garlock faced challenges with a slow quote and order process, demand from distribution channels for enriched product content, declining online sales, and a lack of digitized product content. They engaged with Syndigo to implement a Product Information Management (PIM) system to organize, manage, and improve the quality of product information across their ecosystem and make sure it reached the right endpoints.
Soon they saw dramatic improvements in key commercial performance metrics:
Garlock is a global manufacturer of high-performance sealing solutions with an emphasis on safety, longevity, and productivity. With over 20 unique product lines and thousands of unique product styles, Garlock works closely with their end-user customers, distribution partners, OEMs (original equipment manufacturers), industry associations, and government entities to understand their unique sealing challenges and respond with innovative solutions that keep people safe and the environment protected. Service is an important aspect of the Garlock customer experience and Garlock proudly claims a history of over 140 years of meeting customer needs with unmatched responsiveness and ingenuity.
Scott Lengyel’s role in Garlock’s data transformation began in 2018, when he was an engineering manager, and occasionally sourced replacement parts for manufacturing equipment. A turning point came when he couldn’t find a replacement Garlock seal online, highlighting the need for better product data management and propelling Scott to lead improvements in this area.
Years before the pandemic pushed players across the marketplace to seek digital transformation, Scott had the insight that Garlock needed to leverage e-commerce as a strategic channel to educate new customers while allowing existing customers to self-serve.
Scott embarked on a quest for a solution: a true omnichannel e-commerce website that could integrate comprehensive product data for over 80,000 products with sales and transaction data from their ERP system. This vision set the stage for a transformative journey to enhance Garlock’s digital presence in the market.
Scott and his team reasoned that they would need a coherent digital product content management strategy. They needed tools to enrich product data and images to make product pages more appealing. They needed a place to store all their digital product information and keep their ‘golden records’ current and consistent. And once the content was created and enhanced, they needed a way to publish all the content to their e-commerce sites and their distribution partners.
In short, they needed a Product Information Management (PIM) solution.
Because of the complexity of their product lines and associated product data, they needed a solution with robust governance capabilities to let them create complex business rules unique to their organization. Scott looked through a few options and selected Syndigo.
Garlock began to see improvements in their operations almost immediately after their new eCommerce website built on Optimizely and driven by Syndigo PIM, was launched. Right off the bat, they saw that their customer service teams were less taxed than before. Because of the way the product data pages were incorporating enhanced content, their customers were finding it easier to find the exact products they were looking for and no longer needed to call the service team to help them find standard products. Garlock was looking at improved cost savings and an ability to scale up in the future.
The other aspect where they saw improvement was in the sheer number of products and product categories they could share via syndication. Their distribution partners have seen an increase in sales up to 20-30% by leveraging the enriched content.
But the most stunning improvement came from their own e-commerce website where Garlock saw an improvement of about 2000% in digital self-serve transactions. That is an improvement by a factor of 20! “It’s really phenomenal when you can get (product) information to your customers and see what they do with that information,” said Scott.
“The bottom line is that we’ve achieved our objective of offering customers self-serve ordering, quoting, and more, plus sales revenue growth through enriched content,” added Scott.
Looking ahead, Scott is excited about the opportunities that Syndigo PIM brings to the business. As their business processes evolve with the implementation of the PIM, and as they’ve distributed the responsibilities of updating product information in the system to the owners of the product lines, they’ve observed the opportunities for scaling up.
Overall, Scott would say that their relationship with Syndigo has rested on the partnership approach Syndigo takes with their customers, rather than that of being just a software vendor. “I’ve worked with other software companies but one thing that stands out about Syndigo is the business partner relationship that we have with them,” Scott said. Syndigo’s deep understanding of the industry use cases and customer pain points allows them to not just enable the customers with all the tools that they need, but also to act as a consultant in guiding the customer toward the exact solution that they need.
Scott is excited about the transformative effect he has seen with Syndigo PIM. The explosive growth in e-commerce is just as exciting as the improvement in self-service efficiency for his customers. But he is more excited to see what else the PIM can do for Garlock’s commercial success.
