Hubbell Masters Master Data Management

The complexities of managing a product line aren’t lost on manufacturers with tens of thousands of products streaming through different distribution channels and outlets. For Hubbell, a 125-year-old firm (with 2015 revenues of $3.4 billion) that sells electrical components and systems to residential, commercial and industrial customers, the task is formidable.

The firm operates 70 business units, which translates into 70 catalogs and 70 Websites—all linked through an SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. What’s more, Hubbell sells through four major business groups, including a construction unit.

“We spent 10 years trying together all the systems within SAP,” reports John Riley, senior director of eCommerce & Business Automation. The goal now is to embrace an initiative that the company has dubbed “One Hubbell.”

“We want to create a single repository for all of our product master data,” he explains. “The objective is to feed the One Hubbell Web presence, as well as our print catalogs and catalog data searches.”

The retailers and distributors that sell Hubbell’s products include Home Depot, Granger, Crescent and Shop.Graybar.com. “There is a huge amount of data required to drive all of these systems,” Riley says.

At the center of the challenge is the fact that different internal groups and customers require different data formats and technologies to drive commerce, including Excel, Access, SQL, Industry Data Warehouse (IDW) and a direct database exchange. Ensuring that data moves across systems quickly and seamlessly is critical. “Loading and normalizing data is an enormous task,” Riley points out.

Building a Massive Data Definition Library

In order to cope with the massive data framework, Hubbell turned to product information management (PIM) solutions provider Stibo Systems to build a massive data definition library for the PIM environment.

The STEP multi-domain master data management (MDM) platform is at the center of the company’s drive to digital transformation. The Stibo system allows Hubbell to access data in memory and deliver business product information via a single data feed.

“We no longer have to build a file in 16 different flavors,” Riley notes. In addition, the cloud-based system performs crucial validation in real time—in some cases, leading to speed increases of 100 times for searches and 3 times for exporting data.

Aligning business units, data and customers wasn’t only a technical challenge. “Much of the task is tactical,” Riley says. “It’s a matter of building a project management tool, creating a waterfall and gathering the data.”

However, along the way, “We began to realize that the project involves more than normalizing data. There’s a huge cultural aspect related to everything from sales to human resources. The old way of doing things changed considerably, and people had to change with it.”

In the end, he says that Hubbell, which is continuing to work through the transition and introduce changes, has taken huge strides toward consolidating systems and data feeds. It is a far more efficient company and provides greater value to its partners.

“We are able to distribute data, print catalogs and handle e-commerce more efficiently than ever,” Riley concludes. “It’s a massive undertaking that has come together very smoothly. Hubbell One is ushering in an era where people can work at digital speed.”