On-Demand Webinar: The Future of Commerce - Why is MDM needed?

Angela Meyer: Welcome to our diva-e webinar “The Future of Commerce-Why is MDM needed?” Today you will learn from our experts Tom Grosch from Stibo Systems and Jan Stöckel from diva-e what a Master Data Management System can do for your digital commerce. Let's start with a short round of introductions. My name is Angela Meyer and I'm part of the diva-e marketing team. I'm in charge of our events and webinars, among other things, and I'm your moderator today. Jan and Tom, a few words about yourselves.

Jan Stöckel: Yes, a warm welcome to today's webinar from me too, Jan Stöckel my name. I've been at diva-e for almost 20 years now and I'm responsible for e-commerce and consulting. And the topic of master data management accompanies me every day in the projects and it is often the biggest challenge to ensure this, because it is crucial for a good user experience. I'll explain why this is the case in the first part of the seminar and then Tom will go into more detail. Tom.

Tom Grosch: Yes, thank you very much, Jan, welcome from my side too. My name is Tom Grosch. I'm a Senior MDM Consultant responsible for Sales Support in the DACH region, I work at Stibo Systems and I'm delighted to be here today to show you what we can do to support your user experience and also your success in commerce.

Angela Meyer: Great. I will now hand over to Jan, who will start his presentation, and hope you enjoy listening.

Jan Stöckel: Yes, well, it looks good, the screen can be seen, I can also be seen. We have already seen our cover sheet from Angela. Yes, I wanted to start the presentation and the introduction to the topic with a small study. It was commissioned by Seagate, which some of you may know, is a hard drive manufacturer, a company that naturally deals with the topic of data. And they have analysed how the volume of data will basically increase. You can see very clearly in the study that, starting in 2010 and continuing until 2025, there will be exponential growth. In the end, this is what you see in your daily work.

Everyone knows that the flood of e-mails has been increasing over the years, and now also the flood of messengers. And there is also a beautiful study that is published every year, which always analyses what happens in 60 seconds on the internet. Here is a copy from 2017, where we see, for example, that 800,000 uploaded files end up in Dropbox. Or in Netflix 87,000 hours are streamed worldwide in one second. Or Snapchat, 210,000 Snapchats are published. So, as you can see, there are enormous amounts of data that have already been processed at the moment or in 2017. If you compare that with the current figures, you can see a doubling, tripling or, as with new tools or systems such as Snapchat, where it has risen considerably once again, for example to 2.5 million. Google queries, by the way, have risen again by almost one million and the video clips viewed on Netflix have also experienced a very, very strong increase. So this is due to the fact that digitalisation is progressing extremely fast and can of course no longer be ignored worldwide, and digital services are also increasingly coming into play. In this context, the distribution process as such is of course also a topic that is becoming increasingly digitalised.

Every company is now inevitably dealing with the issue during the Corona crisis. Because if the field sales force can no longer go to the customer, can no longer advise, then in the end the only way left is by telephone or e-commerce, where the business processes are handled. And I would like to show an example of the change this causes in the sales process. Here is my old sales process illustrated by a very simple example. I buy a television. In the past, you often ran to the shop, to Media Markt, Saturn or maybe to an export shop around the corner, and the salesperson on the spot usually had a brand in mind that he wanted to sell you. In other words, it was either Samsung or a Philipps, and in the end he showed the supplier, the television, explained it in detail, and said: "Aha, that's him and the television. And as a rule, the customer also explained what his challenge was. So, where is the television? How far away is it from you? And then the salesperson said: Yes, if you are sitting three metres away and you only want to watch TV occasionally or every evening, I have this model for you. And then, in the end, Samsung suggested a specific model and the product was issued. Of course, it doesn't work quite like that on the internet.

That's where this process changes. And what's decisive is that in the end, the provider who sells the product often ends up at the end of the chain. That is, a customer now goes online with the topic. Using the example of a television, it's like this: I enter that I would like to buy a new 47-inch TV or you would like to buy an OLED TV, and perhaps I also enter how far away I'm sitting, and I've already thought about the size, as I mentioned earlier, and I'll usually first compare the products with each other via advice sites or approaches like Stiftung Warentest, i.e. comparison sites. Some people certainly have a provider in mind, but usually this happens freely at first. And the first thing you do is look at the size of the TV, let's take OLED, the resolution and so on. Then you have to go through all these stages between the solution and the supplier. And that is a very decisive change that is taking place, because the provider itself must now ensure that its products are presented accordingly online and prepared accordingly in terms of promotion.

This means that buying behaviour is changing and this new sales funnel is becoming present for everyone and the products must ultimately be described in a solution-oriented way. This means that simple product lists or properties in tables are not enough, but it must be defined what problems the product solves. Of course, it's not quite as complicated with a TV, but there are customers, even in the medical products sector alone, where it's really a question of what properties the product fulfils, supports that or similar. But also in the TV sector you have to be advised on how far away you should sit from the TV, I already mentioned that example, or what resolution does it have? Is it more suitable for sports or is it perhaps suitable for playing computer games or console games? And so on. And information about these contents, which in the end everyone searches for and researches differently, must be available everywhere at the appropriate place in order to be presented prominently with one's own product.

And then, in the final analysis, it's all about brand. It is very important that you deal with your brand, that you present it and also ensure its value, that you are perceived as the provider and that people buy your product. And in the end, the whole thing across different channels and offline still plays an important role today. Especially when it comes to a television set, one or the other wants to have a look at a real picture. And what a typical customer journey, let's call it, looks like, is something I also brought along.

So, you can see above the individual phases of attention and that someone deals with consideration, i.e. with the topic, the acquisition phase, the purchase phase and then, of course, the downstream service phase and the whole topic of loyalty. So, using our TV as an example, someone will do some research. In the first phase, awareness, shown here in blue, towards the TV. He will buy it. At the bottom, touchpoints are shown in a round shape, through which he will contact the provider or the company, online shop or directly, as I said, with the provider's website. So he will enter that in Google if necessary. Then so-called AdWords or Ads are displayed, which means advertising. And he has the possibility to go directly to the shop of his choice and to inform himself about the television, perhaps he has blog posts that he looks at on the subject. For example: How far can you, should you, sit away from the set? What is it best suited for? For sports? Or for console games? He has the possibility to navigate further via banner advertisements or perhaps in certain newsletters. So we have identified such touchpoints, and the corresponding content must be made available for these touchpoints. Of course, these touchpoints change throughout the phases and the customer also benefits from the fact that you can see right away, for example, in the second phase maybe an app, is on the move on different media, on different devices. This means that the content must of course be suitable for the individual touchpoints and for the phase in which the customer finds himself.

In the beginning, it's more informative or introductory or problem-solving topics. And then it develops from the advisory to the highlighting of why the product is good. Comparative topics, advice and, at the latest in the acquisition phase, everything has to be made available to the customer in a bundled form. The best way to do this is with an evaluation or, in the end, with sample references that the customer ultimately buys. This is often done in an e-commerce system or a special mobile app, and then the service phase follows. Because services and loyalty are particularly important online, because we also want to have good product reflections, which in turn promote new purchases by other customers. And here, too, you should first support the customer with services around commissioning, for example. There are tutorials, and chat bots are listed here once again. We also have the issue of returns, at least returns, if there are problems, that support is available via various channels. And in the end, loyalty is demanded by informing about updates of the television and also asking for evaluations and perhaps also sending a voucher for accessories or something similar. So what do we learn from the slide? The touchpoints are extremely different, they are context-related, that is, the customer is on a journey and wants different information at different points and across devices. Yes, so the bottom line is that we are moving here in a multichannel or, as we also say, in an omni-channel, where the customer is omnipresent. And not only in the digital world, but also with many of our customers in the offline area, where we combine it with digital science networks or similar. So that means monitoring in life.

What is the best way to map something like this? The various channels in the MDM system, in the master data management system, which is ultimately made up of the raw data from various source systems, shown here on the left, we have an ERP system where prices and product, article numbers and ultimately raw data of articles are available. This is usually enriched by marketing. If necessary, we buy the products via dealer structures or from the manufacturer. The manufacturer will provide us with information. The supplier, perhaps also other topics. And we have media data, which in the final effect the videos and also pictures are made available there in addition. And the task of the MDM is now to collect precisely this data product-specifically, to harmonise it if necessary, to assign it, to enrich it. This means that the MDM then of course also works increasingly with marketing and sales to incorporate additional, context-related elements. And then, of course, as an important point, to distribute them to the individual channels. For example, e-commerce systems, mobile apps, offline catalogues, which still play an important role in B2B, but also point of sale, i.e. the shop around the corner and marketplaces, which play a decisive role in Germany, but especially in Asia, and should also be taken into account.

Of course, these are not all of them and what can be said in the course of digitalisation, these different touchpoints are constantly expanding. In the meantime, we are of course also working with voice assistants in some projects. And, we can see my graph here, which shows that there is also an exponential growth in the data that a company has to make available in order to ensure a good product experience, abbreviated PX, or product experience management. Because it's not only possible through this standard product data, but, we need to contextually feed each of these touchpoints and they are driven by certain technologies, I mentioned this before, voice assistants, there are ways now to feed out information through mobile systems, like smartwatches and such. There are certain data feeds and the like, and the providers of feeds also expect specific context-related information. Today's customers no longer want bold advertising, they want personalised content that fits their topics. Tom will then go into more detail and give some examples. So what is the result? So we have a lot of additional information that we have to enrich and create based on the product and for that an MDM is important. And at this point Angela will start a short survey for me to find out how you deal with this topic. Angela.

Angela Meyer: Exactly. And we would like to know how satisfied you are with your internal management process right now. I'm going to start the survey now and you have one minute here, yes, to choose how satisfied you are with your management process right now. More than half of you have already voted. That's quick. So. Ten more seconds. And then I'll close the poll. And then you can respond to the answers. I will now close the survey and show you the answers that came in.

Jan Stöckel: Okay. So, we certainly see a weighting in the direction of "don't know" or "somewhat dissatisfied". That almost turns out to be the case with half. So we certainly see a need for optimisation. The nice thing is that in the end we also see that the results are roughly what other studies say. So, every third person is dissatisfied with their process in the direction of master data management or product data management.

It's nice that our survey roughly reflected that, if not a little worse. And at the end of the day, we want to give impulses here on how you can improve it. That's why you also take part in our workshop and we always say, as I mentioned briefly at the beginning, no good customer experience without product experience, because in the end, the product data is the topic where you lead the customer to the right product and ultimately give him the arguments to buy your product. On average, 40 percent of the company's productivity is tied up in resources due to this topic. This means that you end up working reactively and not proactively on such topics. And with this MDM and the management of product data, you can of course create free space so that your colleagues can deal more with marketing or the like. And, yes, such an MDM provides advantages.

I have summarised these for you once again. We have just seen that it is about this channel-specific playout. And not just channel-specific, but contextual. This means that the product data or overall data is then played out in accordance with the topic that is currently taking place. Be it the attention span or the initial interest of the customer up to the acquisition. The data is played out appropriately when we have the information. They have to be presented in a qualitative or high-quality way. We even offer a golden record of it. This means that the data is used uniformly as the source system for the MDM. Other systems feed, but the only real source is then the MDM system and then delivers, as we saw in the previous chart, an external system. The advantage is, of course, that the system is the only one that is always available. We often work with cloud applications and the like to ensure performance. And, the customer has a system in which his data is kept together and connected via external systems. Be it their own systems such as online shops or external systems or marketplaces and the like.

Localisation

Another important topic in the international context is of course localisation. That means the display of article information in a country-specific way. There are often legal requirements that we have to take into account. In the direction of article labelling or copyright issues and so on. And here, too, an MDM system offers many possibilities to map this. And there are certainly many more topics that need to be taken into account. But we will be happy to work out these with you in dialogue to suit your company. We look forward to your enquiry. Yes, the webinar is also called the Future of Commerce, which is why we also want to give you a little insight into the future. Which technologies will change and advance the topic of master data management in the future and certainly simplify it to some extent? One is, of course, data management itself, which is now much easier due to the availability of storage space. And also the topic of data sources. Data is often available digitally nowadays. That simplifies it for us and that is also being constantly pushed forward. So in general for businesses through digitalisation will continue to drive this topic. We have the topic of blockchain, with which we can check the quality of data, for example. We can check transactions, i.e. truthful topics, and there are various approaches to using the block chain topic in the area of MDM as well.

Cloud

Another topic is, of course, the cloud, which means constant availability. We have already discussed the topic of master data management in combination with higher scalability. This means that when increased requests come in, it is possible to react more quickly with the cloud application and we often have most of the systems in the cloud. This means that we have end-to-end processes that are constantly available or highly available, which enable us to always deliver the products or product information to the right channel at the right time. Assistant-supported process automation, which everyone knows about, spots that are available for consultation purposes, is an important topic that is currently gaining a lot of momentum, which means that in the end, company employees receive pre-qualified enquiries on the phone or the assistant perhaps already hands the question over to the customer. It depends on a good database or a phase in which you learn about people with bot support over time. But we've already had good experience in projects here, to really classify the queries at the beginning or to also automatically output simple topics such as data sheets and so on.

Machine Learning

In the course of this, machine learning is often used. This means that we try to use certain structures to select in advance what kind of request the customer could make. And we also use machine learning in the area of data creation. That means there are approaches to create product data automatically. On the basis of a database, we look at which product characteristics other products with a similar structure have. Over time, the system then learns to create basic product data automatically and certainly also to release it again through approval processes. But such topics are already being considered in many MDM or PIM systems, or will be in the near future. Cognitive, i.e. electronic brains, goes in a similar direction. This means that profound analyses are possible that are not available from humans. We can identify characteristics of product data. Contexts.

A lot of it is about recommendation, that is, on inventory data, such as what which customer bought, we can map via cognitive models what is often bought together, for example, how could this be used in the future in terms of promotion? And the like. That's where the technology comes in. Natural language processing is relatively interesting for our customers and colleagues in advertising, for example. In search queries that are made via natural language, they are completely different than when you type them in. That is, they are more like questions that are then passed on to the Google Assistant in a similar way. And that also means you have to prepare your product data and answers accordingly.

Use Case

We work together with BMW in various projects, where we clarify, for example, the question of how many horsepower a BMW has, or which are then ultimately entered and recorded, handed over to Google and we see to it that we then deliver answers to BMW pages and that the traffic is not lost. Yes, and last but not least the topic of digital analysis. We have already made steady progress in the cognitive area, because we can now use cloud applications such as Azure to handle data very well, even with very large volumes of data, which enables better analysis of purchasing behaviour, relationships and the like, which we can then use in the business processes to ultimately make deductions and ensure better performance in the direction of sales or resales. This brings me to the end of my presentation and I will now hand over to Tom and look forward to gaining an insight into Stibo Systems and how the topic is implemented there. Before that, there will be two small questions so that the Tom can explain the details or, more specifically for you, the topic.

Angela Meyer: Exactly.

Jan Stöckel: Thank you very much.

Angela Meyer: Thank you, Jan, we would now like to know from the participants whether they currently use a PIM or MDM system in their company. I'll start the next survey. The time is running. And, exactly, Tom will then be more specific. Yes. Respond to that. Ten more seconds. And then I'll close the poll. There we go. Now it's getting exciting. So fifty-fifty. So half of the participants already use an MDM system and the other half do not. They still have to be convinced.

Tom Grosch: Super. We can do that. For all those who don't use one yet and all those who already do, to convince them why Stibo is the better choice.

Angela Meyer: Exactly. And now we come to the last survey for the participants. We would like to know which industry you come from. Ten seconds more. And then we will continue with Tom's presentation. Here we go. Now here are the results. So, seventeen per cent are from the service and trade sector, or finance, insurance and real estate, a little trade and from the consumer goods sector. And, yes, the other half from other sectors. So.

Tom Grosch: Perfect. I think we have something for everyone then.

Angela Meyer: Oh, all right. So then I'll hand over the broadcasting rights to you, Tom. Can you also make your presentation with full screen mode?

Tom Grosch: I don't have the broadcasting rights yet. Now. Perfect.

Angela Meyer: Super.

Tom Grosch: Well, welcome again from my side. Today we are not focusing on my camera. Sorry for that, but on the presentation who we are, what we do, what we achieve and what we achieve above all for ... Commerce. We are Stibo Systems. And we are Multi Domain Master Data Management. But we know that we are not the only ones on the market who publicly claim or say that. But what makes us different, we love what we do. We love what we do, every day. And, we have a long history. We have been in the market for decades. We grew up in print once. We have clients globally all over the world with different use cases and we are happy to make new clients happy every day. It's all about that story. It's all about using our highly flexible data or what we offer you in our Digital Business Hub to drive your own business, to drive your commerce activities or to manage other use cases for you.

Very brief overview of who we are, what we do. We are a Danish company with about 20 offices worldwide. This means that we are globally present wherever our clients are, and we currently serve just over 500 clients in various sectors with 700 employees. And the most important thing is that we are triple A-rated, which means that in terms of risk, it doesn't really get any lower than that. That means we are a foundation, we don't need any financing rounds, we are not dependent on any stakeholders, we are a foundation, you can't buy us, we will always exist on the market. And this trust is also given to us by our clients and we also give it back to our clients. And we continue to develop with our clients. That means that our clients are an integral part of our entire history, of our entire further development of the system.

And, what we see, across all clients, and we have just seen it in the survey as well and heard it from Jan, is that it's not just data that's increasing, it's not just the future that looks excellent and that offers excellent opportunities, for each of the different sectors, taking out here four different sectors with different challenges. At the end of the day there is always something underlying everything. At the end of the day every challenge is driven by the business that you want to implement and the data that you ultimately serve your business with. We at Stibo Systems, we prove it globally in different sizes, with different clients.

Here is a small excerpt from our current client list. We have great customers like Uvex. We have great customers like Adidas. We have smaller customers such as Trigema. We have big customers like a McDonalds. We do it globally. And we prove it almost every day that our system is designed to do just that, to ultimately overcome any challenge that these customers have. And we grow with our customers, which is very nice and what you can see here first of all, is we don't have a focus on a particular industry. You will also see logos maybe from you. Competitors of yours perhaps, suppliers, perhaps dealers with them, companies with whom you perhaps work as a business partner. But you will also see logos from the automotive industry. This means that we have the right answer for every suitable challenge with our system.

And how we can change the game, or what our Digital Business Hub can do, is what I would like to show you now. And how we can, above all, also increase your commerce activities, support and actively support everything that Jan said before. In other words, it's all about data. And this data is crucial in order to ultimately counter the general pressure that all companies are facing today. Let's take a look at the main drivers. There is Experience, for example. And Jan has already mentioned this: at the end of the day, customers also buy in the direction of experience. It's about product, how is the product presented? How complete is the product? If we restrict ourselves to the product. But it's also about talking about Digital Transformation. I think no matter which industry we look at, we all face different challenges in Digital Transformation. But it's also about agility, it's about accelerating time to market. It's about getting products to market faster. It's about getting new products to market faster. That means the right product with the right price at the right time, in the right target group.

But it is also about collaboration, about working together and also about compliance requirements for different sectors. That means collaboration controlled company-wide in one system, chat functionality or across work flows, where you can work with each other, where you can control very precisely, ultimately control your complete value change. But it is also about creating transparency. And that is what we are also committed to: Data transparency. Because with data transparency, you are ultimately in a position to work better with your data, you are in a position to do better business and ultimately also to learn from your data what your customers or your partners actually want.

Let's take a look at what it looks like in many companies today. On the right-hand side, we see various data domains that exist in such a company. And you can see here that we are talking about product data, we are talking about customer data, but we are also talking about reference data. But we are also talking about employee data, location data, supplier data, party data or asset data. Pictures, videos, all these things exist in companies today. And you will know, half of you have a PIM and MDM system, what it means to bring all this data together in one system. But we are also talking about industry standards. How do I do that if I want to go in the direction of ETIM, eClass or if I want to extract BMEcat? And that means that our Digital Business Hub ultimately does, grabs various data domains from your companies, we are able to unite these data domains in our Digital Business Hub to ultimately guarantee you a data basis or what this buzzword is always called, single source of truth. This means that you work on one data set in order to ultimately control your activities with this one data set.

There is a very nice anecdote: I once had-, part of my evaluation, and someone said something quite interesting, who said: We can buy the most beautiful Ferrari, buy the most beautiful platform, we can imagine everything, but what is the point if it is all ultimately pulled by a donkey, because we do not have the power to feed this platform with this information, if we do not know what data is really needed in the end? And that's actually burned into the mind quite nicely. And if we also look at what the lifetime of a shop system is, if we look at what does that mean: configuration versus development? How long do our customers use our system? In the end, can we say: our system is highly scalable, highly flexible, with configuration, development, and here I'm also talking about interfaces, and our system has been used by customers for years.

We have clients like a World, which has been using our system since the beginning and also continues to grow with the system. We have other clients from other sectors, where I would like to go into more detail later. That means we bring this data together. It's very important. And we build this data base for your company across all purposes. And it's relatively-, for us it doesn't matter which sector. Because if we look at the retail sector, it's about individual SKUs, if we look at other sectors, such as services, it's about services. This means that if we take a look at this use case, I have picked out a use case for you on the topic of omnichannel. What does omnichannel need to achieve in order to ultimately have this outcome that you see at the bottom, this personalised customer experience across different channels? Which data domains play a role in this? We have, of course, the whole issue of CM customer data. We have the topic maybe another one, Customer Data Sources. But we have the topic of location. That is, which customer buys which product on the right-hand side? Where is this product located, in which warehouse? Or in which store? Where can I sell this product? And wouldn't it be nice if we also knew how many products of this one type fit into which store or which customers frequently buy these products in which regions? And all this in one system? That is, what we do here with our Digital Business Hub, we control these processes that you see in the middle, these acquiring, manage, we synergise, these different data domains and share this master data into the different channels.

And, as Jan said, it grows and grows and grows, and when we look at how much data is created, how fast-moving it all is. Here, once again, a few channels. Whether that's email campaigns, whether that's social media, whether that's a website, whether that's commerce, whether that's your internal support, whether that's your loyalty programme or whether that's The Point of Sale, it doesn't matter to us. We are able to drive each channel with the personalised information based on distributed information that you may also have, the right information to the right-, at the right time to the right channel. That is, looking a little deeper, that was relatively superficial, I would just like to show you when we look at a product detail page. Let's look at a product detail page: And everything that you see coloured orange here is data that comes from our system. It's data that comes from a Stibo system. You see, quite unusually, we are able to do the complete navigation structure for your shop. How do we do that? We are able to reference.

We reference in different -, can reference in different navigation structures. And these navigation structures can of course differ from country to country. We are able to hold your assets, here using the example of an asset. But we are also able to hold every asset. That means any video, any description, 3D images. We have no limits in the system. We are able to link services, warranty services to the product. We are able to keep different variants in the system. That means that if we only look at this side, how much of this side actually comes from one step, from one Stibo Systems, it is remarkable. Of course, if we then look at where the other things all come from, and you see it here coloured blue and green as e-commerce data, which is ultimately really done by the shop or what comes from the ERP, the transactional data, such as pricing. Or it is in stock or out of stock in the specific context, then these are things. But if you compare this with how much data, ultimately how important it is, how much data we can supply centrally but also already, how much data ultimately comes from other systems, it turns out that we hold a large part. We are also able to provide context-sensitive information. What does that mean? We are able to, for example, if you need to watermark other assets or due to regulations assets in certain countries, we hold those assets depending on your, the respective country at a workout. We are able to hold these navigation structures depending on different countries, we are able to hold values of a property of a product depending on different languages on one object. And these are just a few examples when it comes to context.

But when it comes to context, we always talk about: What does it actually look like live? If we take a look at the left-hand side, the traditional page that I have just shown you, the product detail page, on the right-hand side: what is rich content? That is, this rich content, in the past it was always called content is king, now it is called context is king, translated: offering the right context in story telling, the right customer at the right time, to ultimately build a story around my product. Now you might say: Hu, how does that work? Or, where does it all come from? If we look at our system, we hold these different multichannel variants or designs in our system. We keep them in our system and steer them specifically towards the web, towards mobile, towards Facebook or Instagram. We also see it that way because we often get the question: What does it actually look like with the example of a retailer, what does it actually look like with data maintenance? How can I simplify my data management? We say: Data onboarding is a service.

Let-, give your suppliers the possibility to import their data into the system in any format, no matter if it is CSV, XML, iDOC or whatever, JSON. That is, either manually, your supplier logs in and perhaps uploads his list on top here. Or you can offer your product lines directly via a web service connection. All this is controlled via an integrated workflow manager. That means that we have an integrated workflow manager in the system that can be configured, where you can clearly see that on the right-hand side, you have different source workouts from different dealers. Yes, maybe different suppliers offer you the same product. But, after all, it's interesting to have a workout and here we have this Golden Workout, which does hold this information. And, if we think about it, this Data Onboarding is a Service, if you have this one piece of information, and can just as well say, not just say: Dear retailer, you may offer this product or not. But you can also control when this trader is allowed to offer you these products. There must be at least, for example, two pictures, a long description, a short description, the following attributes must be maintained and only then can this trader give you this information. Of course, this also simplifies your process within the system or within the entire publishing process enormously.

Again and again, I have mentioned that it doesn't matter to us which domain. If we take a look at the customer data, it is certainly interesting to know this one customer, this Ana Maria Calcado, but it is also interesting for us to know who her husband is, using this example? Or friends? Or colleagues? This means that in our system we can not only automatically build up different hierarchies of different company structures on the basis of information, where you can then learn, your sales department can then learn: Oh, I'm talking to-, I have this person's record. Maybe it would also be interesting if I talk to this person, because maybe it's the higher-level manager. But you can also see that there are different sources for each of these data sets. No matter if it's a CRM, if it's different ERP systems, if it's different shop systems that ultimately provide information to this data set, it would be nice if we knew: What is really the address? And if we just take this simple address use case and simply look at how the addresses or the structure of the addresses differ per country and what additional information some countries may need, even globally, in order to ultimately have an address, that is already enormous.

We are able to validate this address in our system, in our Digital Business Hub. And to say that this is the real address of the customer based on various information that we get into the system. What does a customer look like in our system? Here is an example of our interface. These interfaces are also freely configurable. That means that you, as the user, decide what these interfaces should look like. This is an idea we got from a customer. And you can see that we hold an asset, an image, and various contact addresses for the customer. But we also hold references on the client. What is his preferred email address how we can reach him? What is his preferred telephone number? Or are we allowed to contact him by phone at all? But we also hold on to these clients for example: What are his preferred payment methods? What are his preferred products? What is the risk score of this customer, the risk of default? But we also hold on to these customers, you can see it in the upper area in the tab, it says GDPR, which means we all know that under the GDPR there are certain requirements that we have to comply with. That means that if we have to delete a data record, then we know where the individual data comes from and can give this information to all our systems so that you can ultimately really determine whether this data record has been deleted or not. But how do we present this overview?

Here is another example of a well-known product, a MacBook. You see in red different suppliers who offer us this MacBook. You see in blue different stores where we offer this product. Here we not only get the name and address of the stores, here we also get the layout plan of these stores. Here we get where this product is placed. But here we also get in Orange different services on this book, for example the AppleCare Plus package. We keep all that on the product and we can expand or limit that in a myriad of ways. It's always nice to be able to display all that, measurements. At the end of the day, there are also KPIs, also for your business. That means we are also able to display KPIs and do measurements in our system. How well does this product sell in the following countries? Or in this country? How well does the product sell over a certain period of time? How good is the quality of the supplier data I get for this product? What might I need to change? What is the customer feedback for this product that I might need to change? How did this marketing campaign get to the customers? Here we have a tremendous amount of ways that you can ultimately measure quality of your data domain-wide across the entire company. That means, in a nutshell: away from these silos in the company, towards a real multi-domain master data management with our Digital Business Hub, where you can handle all your domains in one central point, a central entry point for business, in order to ultimately also present the best experience in a targeted, customer-specific way, for example in commerce.

A commerce system is always as strong as the data it receives. And we are able to feed the commerce system with any data to ultimately achieve the best customer experience or digital experience. Another very important question is: Yes, how do I start? What do I have to do? This means that we often hear from customers: I prefer to start with a PIM system, and Stibo System is not a PIM system. But that's not true. We are basically a PIM system, a flexible data model. We can represent all entities. That means with us you start as a PIM system, and we are comparable to any other PIM system, we are not afraid of comparison. With us, you also have the scalability towards the future. No matter what you want to do in the future, you can do it with our Digital Business Hub. And, don't believe me? Look at our customers. They are already doing it today. I have a few examples right now of that too. That is, how do I get started? And can I even do smaller operations with a Stibo? Yes, that is possible. That means you can crawl with us, you can walk with us and you can run with us. And we agree, and I'm not telling the story, you will have the best possible data quality right from the start. You're not going to go to the multidomain master data management from the beginning. You might start with the product domain for PIM. You go further towards customer and then connect your customer with the product. And finally you optimise and learn from the data.

We have functionalities towards artifi-, AI, artificial intelligences. We are able to do automatic classifications. We are able to support any industry standards out of the box. We are able to configure instead of develop. This means that with us, and this is important to us, the customer, you learn relatively early. And above all, we are particularly proud, not only of our customers, but of our partners.

We have a large partner network, like diva-e, with whom we have today, with whom I can do the webinar with Jan today, where we are very proud to have as partners who ultimately also drive the implementation. Always with Stibo Systems as a partner. And in the end it's a threesome, like a joking business model, I would say. That is, this threesome as partner, vendor or Stibo Systems and you as the customer ultimately results in the best possible experience and ultimately success. I can talk a lot, of course, and we can tell you a lot. Our best references are our customers. That is, let's take a look at a few customers thought in the direction of scalability. Let's take bol.com as a market place, where we drive millions of data through this market place every day. Every day. And here, these are not made-up statements, these are real statements from our customers that you can let work, where the customers say: Thanks to Stibo Systems we were able to increase our sales. And we have a scalable solution in the marketplace area, but also in the banking area. Banks, also quite interesting, Finance world, here with an example the Royal Bank of London, where various, or more precisely 9.1 million policyholders and 3,000 employees are with Stibo Systems. And, I always do, you may also know from your own experience, insurance. Last year I took out insurance in case my insurance man didn't know that I might have other insurances, and he might be able to offer me more insurances, because he might have noticed: Gosh, Tom might have a little daughter, maybe she needs insurance too. In other words, there are countless possibilities in every sector for how you can ultimately expand your business model.

Another nice customer is also Rituals. Rituals uses our system as a multidomain, as a real multidomain, which means that Rituals uses our system, Rituals has 26 countries, is active in 26 countries, has more than 350 shops and 1,500 shops and shop stores-. Our system not only arranges the products, not only controls the products, but in this system at Rituals all the pictures, documents, contracts, certificates, regulatory, quality requirements, the assortments lie, the prices lie, the suppliers are controlled, the customer data is managed and even the set-up of these individual panels that you see in the shop comes from the Step. That means we have countless possibilities. Take the opportunity. Walk the walk. Turn to diva-e. We are against your use cases. I am convinced that all your use cases can at least give us an idea or a way forward as to what might be possible in the future. In a nutshell, you get a greater Customer Insides on Focus with our system. You can seamlessly integrate our system into your existing landscape. You optimise your end to end process with our system by managing a Data Foundation across all domains and all on one platform. This means you don't need any more systems. Just the thought of what you save in your infrastructure. Also everything on one platform and ultimately for Commerce to achieve the greatest possible Customer Experience. Yes. That concludes my part. And now I look forward to questions.

Angela Meyer: Yes, thank you Jan and Tom for your insights into MDM systems. And now we will start with the Q&A session. And you are welcome to ask your questions via the question box. And, I'll start with the first questions that have already come in during the webinar. And, one participant would like to know what the leading system would be. ERP or MDM?

Tom Grosch: Yes, a great question. Both and. It depends on your strategy. We have customers who have Step, which means that the product or the record starts to live in Step and then returns the article number to us controlled in parallel via the integrated workflow of an ERP, and in parallel to that the enrichment already continues. There are customers who say: We use ERP as the leading system for product creation. Everything in the ERP. And the ERP then plays out the direction. We are one of the systems on the market that have a certified SAP interface, an interface certified by SAP, not just a connector. That means it's up to your strategy. ERP leading or step leading. But diva-e can also help you identify that. Both are possible.

Jan Stöckel: Exactly, I would say so too, Tom. It's always a mixture on the projects as well. There is data on prices, which is often determined via an ERP system. And availabilities and again, I would say rather marketing-relevant and context-specific information is usually carried by a product management system like Step or the MDM system. But, as I said, there are different scenarios. We would be happy to advise you.

Angela Meyer: You just mentioned Step. Here, a participant would also like to know where the added value of Step's customer handling lies if he already has a CRM.

Tom Grosch: Excellent question. We are not a competitor to a CRM system. On the contrary, we have a partnership with Mulesoft and Salesforce. That is, do the test, go into a CRM system and see how many records are perhaps duplicates and what it takes to clean them up. We look behind this, similar to the Commerce System, we get these data records, duplicate these data records and output these data records as one data record back to the CRM, so that work can then continue and ultimately the sales employee does not have to search: What is the correct name of the customer? With AG? Without a public limited company? With a GmbH? Without GmbH? But we give out the data set so that your sales department can work better with it or your campaigns.

Angela Meyer: Then I'll take up the next question here: Is the MDM system available as Software as a Service or on Promise?

Tom Grosch: We give you the option, both on promise and SAS, software as a service. Here we are relatively free whether you want to host an Azure or an AWS. You have the choice with us. 
Angela Meyer: And here a participant would also like to know specifically how much data Stibo Systems can process.
 Tom Grosch: Millions. We are still 
trying to find the limit ourselves. I gave an example with BOL, which manages several million data records in a step. We recently had a scalability report carried out and sent them the diva-e, where they can see what our platform can actually handle and how robust it is.

Angela Meyer: So, and now from the very beginning. Where is the best place to start a project?

Tom Grosch: An MDM project?

Angela Meyer: Yes.

Tom Grosch: The best way to start is to choose the right partner, with diva-e, but you also start by identifying: What is the business case? What do I want to achieve? Where do I actually want to go? Of course, you also try to make it measurable somehow. You also start with this: What are the expectations? You might also try to conduct surveys with the help of your partner. What does my client actually expect from me? You start by identifying: Where is the data today? If you don't want to do this yourself, we of course have a procedure that we do together with our partner in projects like diva-e. We help you both with the measurement of the RUI or with the identification of the respective RUI as well as with the identification and creation of the business case, of course also for your own commitment or internal commitment as well as with the identification of data, which is the or the big vision behind it. 

Angela Meyer: Okay. Then I would like to thank all participants for the numerous questions, and if you have any further questions, please feel free to contact our sales contact Guido Juchert. Feel free to contact Guido directly by phone or e-mail. He will be happy to answer any further questions you may have and to discuss the topic of MDM systems in more detail with you. Of course, we will also make the recording and the presentation available afterwards. A note about our other webinars, which we hold weekly, and remember that on the ninth of September our joint webinar with Spryker will take place. Alexander Graf from Spryker and our Spryker expert, Janine Poser from diva-e, will uncover ten myths about Spryker together. The webinar will be very exciting. We look forward to your participation. And now I would like to thank you two, Tom and Jan, for your time and your input. It's been exciting. And, yes, I wish you all a nice afternoon and say: See you next time.

Jan Stöckel: Yes, thank you very much from me too. Bye.

Tom Grosch: Bye.

Angela Meyer: Bye.