Background

ITW Construction Products is a subsidiary of ITW (Illinois Tool Works), a diversified manufacturer of industrial technologies that employs 60,000 people worldwide and has annual revenues in excess of $15 billion.

In mid 2011, ITW selected Magnolia as the CMS platform for the re-launch of their UK construction products website.  In parallel, they selected inRiver as their PIM (Product Information Management) platform for managing product data including product specification and configuration, spare parts and accessories, and pricing information.

In October 2011, ITW engaged Priocept to assist with the development of the Magnolia CMS platform and its integration with the inRiver PIM.  Priocept used its extensive knowledge of both Magnolia CMS, and the underlying Java Content Repository (JCR) platform, to assist ITW’s internal development team not only in the development of the new CMS based website, but also in defining an overall CMS and PIM solution architecture.  This architecture was designed to allow modelling of product data within a JCR content repository, and integration of Magnolia CMS with the inRiver PIM to allow transfer of data between the PIM and the CMS, in turn allowing publication of product data to the web using Magnolia CMS, while allowing the definitive product data to be managed within the core PIM system.

Priocept also worked on-site at ITW to assist their internal development team with the setup of the overall Magnolia CMS web development environment and build and deployment processes, ensuring that ITW’s internal development team were quickly up to speed and achieved productivity with a technology that was initially unfamiliar to them.

About Magnolia CMS

After its first release in 2003, Magnolia quickly became a leading content management solution for the Java platform. Due to its easy-to-use web interface and open standards such as JSR-170, it is being used in several thousand installations world-wide.

Priocept has been working with Magnolia since 2009 and we have been working with the Java Content Repository (JCR) platform that underpins Magnolia since 2007.

About inRiver PIM

inRiver PIM manages the creation, maintenance and distribution of product information.  This includes management of product inventories, product specifications, translation and management of multi-lingual content, versioning of product data and attributes, planning of product assortments, and management of product variations and interrelationships such as links between a main product and the accessories or spare parts available for that product.

For companies with a large number of product SKUs, and a complex product data model, the product cataloguing features available in a web-focussed e-commerce or CMS platform may not be adequate for managing the entire suite of product data.  In this scenario, deployment of a dedicated PIM platform which is then integrated with the web platform, will provide a best of breed solution for both the product management team and the web or online marketing team, without compromise in either area.