Philips Case Study
Case Study
Maximizing reuse in product communications
With a growing product range, expansion into new markets and an increasing range of communication channels, Philips Consumer Electronics was faced with hugely complex multilingual content management challenges. It has made dramatic improvements by fundamentally changing business processes and introducing new XML-based technologies. The result is faster time-to-market, improved quality of communications and significantly reduced costs. The complexity challenge Philips Consumer Electronics (PCE) is one of the world’s top three consumer electronics companies, and the largest in Europe. Luuk de Jager, Senior Manager for Global Content Management, was faced with a complex content management chain involving many isolated processes. Over 9,000 communications were required to source content for product catalogs, translation of the same content was happening multiple times and it was taking over four months for new content to reach local websites. There were 1,800 different logos and over 50,000 different product specifications, including over 10,000 different feature descriptions. With a requirement for web content in 19 different languages, catalogs in 28 languages and product leaflets in 35 languages, it was clear that a lot of time and money was being wasted. Increasing business demands Luuk de Jager also needed to satisfy increasing demands from the business. “New products needed to be launched
simultaneously across all markets for manufacturing, marketing and sales to operate as efficiently as possible. In the world of consumer electronics, timeto-market can be a key competitive advantage, and our existing processes were introducing too many delays. Quality and consistency were also suffering, leading to poor communications with consumers and potentially damaging Philips’ brand.” Addressing the increasing complexity and demands from the business needed a fundamentally different approach. “Our goal was to
Maximizing reuse in product communications
With a growing product range, expansion into new markets and an increasing range of communication channels, Philips Consumer Electronics was faced with hugely complex multilingual content management challenges. It has made dramatic improvements by fundamentally changing business processes and introducing new XML-based technologies. The result is faster time-to-market, improved quality of communications and significantly reduced costs. The complexity challenge Philips Consumer Electronics (PCE) is one of the world’s top three consumer electronics companies, and the largest in Europe. Luuk de Jager, Senior Manager for Global Content Management, was faced with a complex content management chain involving many isolated processes. Over 9,000 communications were required to source content for product catalogs, translation of the same content was happening multiple times and it was taking over four months for new content to reach local websites. There were 1,800 different logos and over 50,000 different product specifications, including over 10,000 different feature descriptions. With a requirement for web content in 19 different languages, catalogs in 28 languages and product leaflets in 35 languages, it was clear that a lot of time and money was being wasted. Increasing business demands Luuk de Jager also needed to satisfy increasing demands from the business. “New products needed to be launched
simultaneously across all markets for manufacturing, marketing and sales to operate as efficiently as possible. In the world of consumer electronics, timeto-market can be a key competitive advantage, and our existing processes were introducing too many delays. Quality and consistency were also suffering, leading to poor communications with consumers and potentially damaging Philips’ brand.” Addressing the increasing complexity and demands from the business needed a fundamentally different approach. “Our goal was to