My name is Gerhard Van Der Bijl and within Wehkamp I'm responsible for the front end
technology ecosystem or the marketing technology platform so to speak.
Wehkamp is in Netherlands the biggest online department store.
We have around 180 000 products in our store from about 1800 different brands and on a
daily basis we have a huge amount of unique visitors.
The business we are in requires that people are working very closely together as so if
you read about agile it's all about breaking down silos between departments.
inRiver is supporting that strategy within our company.
What we also did with implementing inRiver, is that we applied a segmentation in our catalog
so we have a segment where we only use the basic product information of a product and
we have a segment where we add additional information and then the top segment is really
where the focus is from the merchandises.
So in general by implementing that split time-to-market of the overall catalog is really improved.
A very big benefit is that very natural split being made between managing the master data
of a product and enriching it with merchandise information.
second benefit is related to the use of external data pools available outside the company that
we can harvest.
Third one is that potential use of supplier onboarding, we can do more with the same number
of people in less time.
We choose inRiver because we believe at Wehkamp, that building good ecommerce platforms is
about mixing software that you bye in the market with software that you make.
From an overall perspective, at this moment in time, Wehkamp is automating a lot of processes
with tools, people and processes.
In the near future, all kind of areas machine learning will do that job, so I think in the
future we can combine insights from PIM from inRiver with other insights that we have all
for the better customer experience.
inRiver is ahead of the market related to PIM functionality so it's fitting perfectly
in the technology ecosystem that we want to deliver at Wehkamp.
Besides the functionality, it's also about the partner supporting inRiver and the team
behind inRiver.
Our ecosystem is about agility, time-to-market and with inRiver we feel that we have the
same approach to delivering software.
The same agility, the same ambition regarding time-to-market for example, so also from that
perspective inRiver fits perfect.
What excites me most are the people behind the product and the people from inRiver.
In the end software can be built by anybody around the world and I really think implementing
good software is people business so people make the difference.
