HOW MCR SAFETY USES DIGIZUITE TO ENHANCE THEIR OMNICHANNEL EXPERIENCE
Summary
Headquartered in Collierville, Tennessee, MCR Safety is a leading manufacturer of personal protection equipment (PPE). For over 45 years, MCR Safety’s motto has been, “We Protect People”. MCR Safety sells its solutions through a large network of distributors across multiple continents - North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia.
Who is MCR Safety?
A leading manufacturer of personal protection equipment (PPE) for automotive, construction, metal fabrication, mining, oil and gas, and welding industries.
Enterprise Breakdown:
300 employees; 2 distribution facilities; 1,500 distributors that sell MCR solutions across multiple continents – North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Australia; 6,000+ product SKUs.
Challenge:
Initially, MCR saw its main challenge lying within the accounting department, which had a document management problem. There was no repository or any kind of centralized system to handle the hundreds and thousands of invoices and receipts. Soon, though, they realized they had a general digital asset management problem that impacted the entire organization. It was prohibitively time consuming to find the right assets, manipulate different file types for different needs, and so on.
Revenue:
$42 million US dollars.
Solution:
Implemented the Digizuite DAM in 2018.
Results:
Time-saving, streamlined mechanisms for finding and manipulating assets and other files, and then adding relevant metadata to said assets so every single distributor in MCR’s vast network has timely access to all sales-fueling content.
The ability to simply create smooth omnichannel experiences for customers at all points of the buying journey.
Highly integrated digital ecosystem that automates workflows between systems and thus facilitates efficiency and productivity for digital, sales, and marketing teams.
The Challenge
In 2018, Bret Lipscomb, Manager of Digital Solutions was challenged with finding a solution to handle the accounting department’s document management problem. MCR didn’t have a document storage repository to handle the hundreds and thousands of invoices and receipts. In searching for different solutions, Bret stumbled upon digital asset management.
He says, “It was surprising. We didn’t think we had a need for digital asset management, and it didn’t feel like a fit. But as we continued our search for an answer, this digital asset management concept kept coming up.”
They decided to investigate further and the more they investigated the more excited they got.
MCR had digital assets stored on various storage drives scattered around the organization. Digital marketing efforts, internal production of digital assets, email marketing and field sales activities weren’t aligned.
They emailed files back and forth with different versions of an asset and sometimes even lost control of where the original asset was.
This made it very time consuming to find the right assets, manipulate different file types for different needs and finally add relevant meta data so that the assets could be sent in a timely and efficient manner to their distributor network.
Bret explained, “We have over 6,000 independent SKU’s and each SKU has multiple sizes. For example, a glove size can range from extra small to a 4X. Sometimes we even have 8X sized garments and ponchos. Every SKU has a minimum of one to two images. We’ve also been creating 360-degree images where each image consists of 24 frames. And that’s just our still images. If we include videos and action shots, I’d say we have about 80,000 to 90,000 assets.”
But the organization didn’t know that they had a problem. Everyone just accepted that’s how things were – until Bret showed them another way.
The Solution
When Bret stepped back and took a holistic view of their landscape of applications, he realized that what they needed was a way to fix the content supply chain process, from creation, to management and then distribution.
To enable this, he would need to connect the different Tier 1 platforms together. Tier 1 applications are those systems which are vital to the running of an organization. For MCR, their Tier 1 systems are SAP and Sitecore.
SAP houses their product availability and pricing information, while Sitecore contains the product marketing data. As a Sitecore developer, Bret was clear that the DAM platform had to integrate and interface well with the CMS system.
“There aren’t many DAM platforms that integrate well with Sitecore. They say that they do, but when you look under the hood at how they did it, it’s not done right from a development standpoint. We chose Digizuite because they do the
Sitecore integration properly.”
The implementation of a system can go one of two ways. You can either do it on your own or you can enlist the advice and help of the vendor or partner. Bret says, “The implementation was a collaborative effort. We didn’t just get an out-of-box solution. The Digizuite team did a lot of research upfront and helped us to set up the right metadata fields. We took the approach that an asset is just an asset. And we also didn’t want to duplicate data anywhere. So even though Digizuite can contain metadata like product attributes and description segments, we wanted that information to stay in Sitecore, and the pricing and availability information to stay in SAP.”
Digizuite integrates seamlessly with Sitecore and SAP integrates with Sitecore via a custom synchronization job. With all three systems, we are able to centralize our product data, marketing data, and digital assets in a commonplace.
This change allowed Bret to reduce from four to five different asset sources down to one place, allowing the marketing teams to streamline their processes and save more time.
The Results
You might think that the marketing department was jumping with joy at the change, but Bret says the system was received with mixed feelings. The younger team members were super happy and excited about the change. The more seasoned team members were not feeling the same sense of joy.
Bret strongly believes that if he had not “forced their hand”, the system would not have been a success. He says, “The lack of automation, duplication of efforts and manual workload was not enough to make the older team members change.
The guys who took the pictures didn’t really care about the linking and the tagging of the assets. That wasn’t their job. But what was their job was the creation of different variations of product images or different file formats.
“Once they were shown how one psd file could automatically be turned into different variants, like .jpg, high res cmyk, tiff or transparent png’s, the light bulb went off and they realized how much time they could save from doing manual work.”
ACCELERATED Time to market
As a B2B manufacturer, 100% of MCR’s business is done through their distributor’s e-commerce sites.
Bret explains, “Each distributor has their own website where they sell different products. So, we provide the digital assets, as well as the marketing metadata for our products so that they always know which asset to use on their website.”
To enhance the content distribution process, Bret created a script that generates assets in bundles.
The way it works is that the script goes into SAP, grabs pricing, then grabs metadata out of Sitecore, grabs images out of Digizuite, bundles all of that into a zip file. When a distributor needs an asset for his e-commerce site, he can directly then go into Digizuite and pick up what he needs.
EXPANDING THE OMNICHANNEL STRATEGY
Digizuite is a platform that supports MCR’s omnichannel strategy. Every department in the company pulls digital assets and product information from the platform.
“That’s why we knew that whenever we implemented some kind of asset management system, it had to be a Tier 1 application because it was going to touch every aspect of the business from marketing to sales to distribution,” says Bret.
“I chose Digizuite because it is a
best-of-breed digital asset management solution for enterprises. You want to be careful about all-in-one type products that do too many things at once. When you bolt
too many pieces together into one system, you’re going to get a lot of things, but
you’re not going to do any of them good.”
Bret Lipscomb
Manager of Digital Solutions
MCR Safety
The key takeaway
Enhanced content distribution processes and reduced time spent on manual work.