Pimento Product Information Management implementation for Piaggio

Background

Founded 1884 by Rinaldo Piaggio and based in Pontedera, near Pisa, the Piaggio Group is now part of an industrial holding. The Group’s wide product range include scooters, motorbikes and motorcycles with displacements from 50 to 1,200 CC under the brands Piaggio, Vespa, Gilera, Aprilia, Moto Guzzi, Derbi, Scarabeo. The Group is also active in the 3- and 4-wheel light transport segment with the Ape, Porter and Quargo (Ape Truck) ranges of commercial vehicles.

Business needs

As to manufacturing, the Piaggio Group operates in the world with a number of plants located in different countries. At Pontedera (Pisa, Italy), 2-wheel vehicles with the Piaggio, Vespa and Gilera brands are manufactured, together with the light transport vehicles for the European market and engines for scooters and motorbikes. Noale (near Venice) is the motorbike development technical center and hosts the Aprilia Racing structures, while the nearby Scorzè is a plant that manufactures 2-wheel vehicles with the Aprilia ande Scarabeo brands. Mandello del Lario in Lecco on Lake Como manufactures the Moto Guzzi vehicles and engines; Martorell (Barcelona, Spain) is dedicated to the Derbi brand.

Outside Europe, plants exist in India, Vietnam and China . A complex manufacturing network, which requires maximum coordination to ensure customers consistently receive the quality levels the Piaggio Group brands are renown for. Therefore, the Piaggio Group appointed Key Technologies to implement the software platform for managing and publishing the spare parts, accessories and merchandise catalogs.

Key Technologies was chosen on the basis of a software selection operated directly by the Piaggio Group. Based on the EPARTS solution from Key Technologies, the new platform has been available to Piaggio Group since 2010 and addresses the Group’s dealer network at a worldwide level.

Solution

Through EPARTS users can identify and order directly from the Piaggio Group spare parts, accessories and original merchandise products in an easy and univocal way. Piaggio Group ‘s customized EPARTS solution is solidly integrated with the designing and manufacturing systems and allows the company to manage the catalog’s entire lifecycle through integrated tools that automate most operations previously requiring manual processing and specific know-how, while providing users with specific analysis and control tools.

Each solutions has specific strenghts and the priority goals are multiple.
Among different pourposes, the twofold simplification of catalog creation and reduction of management times and costs stands out.

It is also very important the quality improvement in the published information, together with the ability to insert automated content in multi-channel mode and, at the same time, the opportunity to provide all users with up-to-date and intuitive tools to identify components.

Another key goal is achieving significant increases in the sales of original spare parts.

Moreover, Piaggio Group recently extended the EPARTS solution with Pimento, in order to centralize and improve product information management, multiply product information distribution to ecommerce channels and marketplaces and ensure a stable growth in sales of the Accessories and Merchandising products.