How Graybar Canada restructured its product taxonomy for a new E-commerce platform

Graybar Canada is a subsidiary of Graybar Electric Inc, - North America’s oldest and largest electrical wholesale distributor, and a Fortune 500 company for

Case Study Overview

Graybar Canada is a subsidiary of Graybar Electric Inc, – North America’s oldest and largest electrical wholesale distributor, and a Fortune 500 company for 27 years. The Torq IT team worked with Graybar Canada to bring product information from several thousand products and different data sources into a PIM implementation. Working with their data administrators, we were able to create a new application that helped them sort all of their products into a new taxonomy that is compatible with their upcoming E-commerce platform.

Key Customer facts:

400+ Employees
80,000+ Products

The Challenge: Help the customer find what they need

Graybar Canada has several customers who are looking to purchase a variety of different products. The data supplier provided the data in a taxonomy that was completely unusable for the PIM or for the purposes of setting up an E-commerce platform. Graybar Data Experts created a new product taxonomy suitable for use, but sorting the product data into these taxonomy categories via excel sheets is a disaster and unsustainable in the long run.

Our Solution: Ready, Set, Sort

We began by setting up a Pimcore implementation suitable for Graybar Canada’s needs. After that, the Torq team worked closely with client data experts to design and develop a Taxonomy tool. This would conveniently enable product data experts to sort products into their respective taxonomy leaves. With convenient filtering options to help sort through all products and an easy-to-use searchable tree for taxonomy items, the goal was to provide users with a simple but efficient interface to move unsorted products into proper taxonomy categories.

The Results: Record Speeds

In previous product data management efforts, the client would have several data experts sort through spreadsheet records for weeks on end. With the new taxonomy tool, individual users were able to sort thousands of products in a day – helping to grow a new product taxonomy for the client’s future E-commerce platform and generate better relationships between product data for the Pim. Ultimately, the speed with which the products can be sorted now gives a much greater degree of flexibility to future efforts with updating and maintaining taxonomies as well.

Customer Quote:

“Graybar Canada required a PIM with specialized sorting tools that could integrate into both our ERP and e-Commerce platforms. TORQ IT and PIMCORE were up to the challenge. The quick deployment and ease of use of the sorting tools helped saved hundreds of hours of manual sorting using excel. The adaptability of PIMCORE and the implementation of it by TORQ IT has exceeded our expectations.”

-Daniel Knoop, E-commerce Manager, Graybar Canada