International procurement solution

E-Procurement for Schweitzer Fachinformationen

1868

Founding year

208 Mio. €

Branches in 24 cities

in Germany

550 employees

50,000,000 articles

Scope of the title database

< 200 ms per search query

to the search & filter system

2,000,000

Title data updates per day

Configurable web frontends

depending on customer target group

Mobile APP

for the B2C Webshop

New Products Notification

and other digital services (= individually configurable services for each customer)

Since 1999

Customer of ICONPARC

Schweitzer Fachinformationen

Know what is important: Schweitzer Fachinformationen provides experts quickly and conveniently with exactly the specialist literature that is relevant for their success - printed or in the form of e-media. What's special: As one of the leading providers of specialist information, it combines specialist advice with sophisticated solutions (concepts for e-procurement, intranet and fulfilment) and flexible logistics. This makes Schweitzer Fachinformationen a strong partner for companies, libraries, law firms, administrations and authorities. The Schweitzer Fachinformationen companies - with 24 locations - employ over 550 people.

Project goals
  • Development and establishment of the online channel as a perfect complement to the local branches

  • Expand the core business of the pure specialist book trade with scalable services, accelerate and automate the procurement processes for customers.

  • Extensive automation of content management, in particular title data management, with up to 2 million title updates per day

  • New Products Notification: Marketing support through automated offers that are finely granular and configurable and tailored to the respective customer needs.

  • Connections to merchandise management systems (Schweitzer internal as well as to major customers) - with the possibility of enriching order data differently with information depending on the customer, such as cost centres, customer identification or location

Realization

With the e-procurement platform from ICONPARC, Schweitzer has created the technical prerequisites for a unique selling proposition: In addition to the pure trading business, the specialist for technical literature optimizes the procurement process for C-items for its customers. Cost-intensive secondary processes and informal "wild purchasing" by customer departments are drastically minimized. For example, a company's press office often needs the current daily newspapers by 6:00 am. 

With Schweitzer, procurement does not stop at the doorman's door: the customer receives the latest specialist literature right to the workplace of the respective customer - and at the same time lowers his process costs. These often exceed the pure product price, so that it is worthwhile for corporate customers to choose a supplier who is able to offer a comprehensive and automated procurement process. This is exactly what Schweitzer does, and very successfully.

Functional highlights
  • Individually configurable ordering and research interfaces for Schweitzer customers, from simple web shops to sophisticated shopping platforms with the look and feel of the respective customer intranet. The platform includes in particular catalog management, editorial system and procurement functionalities.

  • Optimum scalability as well as best performance and availability are guaranteed by the redundantly designed infrastructure with intelligent load distribution: Frontends, backend and search system are each served by a separate server cluster. Growth is easy to manage by simply adding more servers.

  • With the steadily increasing number of products for all media types in the print and digital sectors, the demands on product data management are increasing. With ICONPARC's e-business platform, titles are intelligently consolidated across supplier boundaries in a comprehensive database. In addition, data on selected titles can be optimized as required in the catalog editing system.

  • Comprehensive support of eBooks including their delivery processes

  • Mobile app version of the B2C Shop

  • Seamlessly integrated editorial content, catalog data and business processes, so that dependencies between the individual components are automatically taken into account. For example, if a title is removed from the catalog, there are no editorial references.

  • Cross-database search with duplicate filtering, ranking, fault tolerance

  • Enhancement of search results with customer-specific inventory information

  • Quick search in over 35 million titles in less than 200 milliseconds

  • Furthermore, access to external databases (Beck-Online, Haufe-Produkte, Juris, Legios, Macrolog, NWB Verlag, LexisNexis etc.) without the need for a separate new registration (single sign-on access).

  • Seamlessly integrated platform manager for Schweitzer employees

  • Individually configurable procurement and processing processes for each customer

Whitepapers
Customer Testimonials