Franz Mensch GmbH in Buchloe in the Allgäu region is a leading supplier and manufacturer of hygiene, cleaning, and packaging products. The family-owned company has also been operating an online store based on Shopware for several years. This e-commerce platform makes an important contribution to the company’s digitalization success, not only in times of the coronavirus pandemic. The web shop is being further developed jointly by the Franz Mensch e-commerce team and the internet agency scope01 from Frankfurt am Main.
Employees manage efficiently the product data for the online shop in the PIM system Pimcore and then transfer it to the Shopware shop via the Pimcore PIM interface from scope01. In addition to central data storage, Franz Mensch maps important processes in Pimcore. This means that the entire product life cycle of a product is integrated, from the import of master data from the RS2 ERP system to the publication of the product in the Shopware shop. The product goes through several instances before it is successfully published.
What are declarations of conformity?
As part of process automation and digitization, Franz Mensch has teamed up with scope01 to automate the creation of declarations of conformity. A declaration of conformity is a mandatory requirement for CE marking and for placing the corresponding product on the market in the European Economic Area. For example, a glove must meet a number of legally prescribed standards:
Only if the glove meets these standards can Franz Mensch, as the manufacturer, issue a declaration of conformity:
After all, only with this technical documentation may, for example, a medical device be used in a clinic or doctor’s office, or personal protective equipment be used in a food company.
Thanks to the integration of Shopware and Pimcore, these declarations are automatically displayed as PDF documents in the online shop in the product details:
Templates for declarations of conformity
Pimcore itself provides several templates for declarations of conformity. Employees can flexibly modify these templates to quickly and easily create new types of declarations. The declarations generally consist of fixed—non-modifiable—components such as company information. Users can change these fixed text elements at any time in the Pimcore backend and then regenerate all documents of this type.
In addition, variable components such as text elements and product data from Pimcore’s PIM component are taken into account when generating the documents. The open source tool wkhtmltopdf is the technical basis for PDF generation.
A preview function allows Franz Mensch employees to check the documents at any time before they go live. Declarations are assigned to products based on their properties. As a PIM system, Pimcore versions each generated version of a declaration of conformity in an audit-proof manner. Finally, the quality management team at Franz Mensch gives the final approval.
In any case, the digitization of these processes has replaced the previous manual creation of declarations in Microsoft Word. This automation allows Franz Mensch to significantly reduce process time and costs. And thus become significantly more efficient.
Initially, the documents are available in German and English. However, an expansion to other languages is already planned. In addition to declarations of conformity, technical data sheets and labels for packaging are also dynamically generated from Pimcore. Thus, Pimcore not only serves as a central repository for product data, but is increasingly becoming the software for automating processes.
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