Every company struggles with providing a consistent database across several countries and systems. InfoZoom helped the master data management team at Eaton harmonize data sets from different systems. Thanks to its versatility, InfoZoom has saved the company a significant amount of time and budget.

High data quality around the world as a success factor

An international company with 98,000 employees, Eaton operates in numerous international markets and provides customers from more than 175 countries with energyefficient solutions. International success requires a product information management system (PIM) which can be used globally. The existing PIM database in Germany had already been in use for more than 20 years and needed modernization. Furthermore, all database content, attributes, IDs, and values were in German. With an increasing number of global applications for that data, the company established a global PIM database with a new data model.

For this purpose, approximately 150,000 products and items with all their attributes and units had to be transferred to the new data model, but also translated into English. The migration was first initiated using Excel, but soon it became evident that this required too much time, manpower, and resources. The level of complexity of the data set required more functionality, particularly as the product attributes could change with every data update. With Excel, the master data team had to start from scratch with every new data extraction. The team quickly realized that they needed a different solution. This is where InfoZoom came into play. The software had already been used three years prior in a pilot project. The project had been about optimizing translations from one system for the migration to a new translation memory system and hence establishing an efficient process for transferring language pairs. Within only four weeks, they had achieved the first good results with InfoZoom, proving it the best option for the migration of the PIM database. Several workshops were held for the migration of the PIM database in order to develop a process for the recognition and reconciliation of the different data types based on special sets of rules and templates.

The Eaton team soon realized that the InfoZoom solution saved a significant amount of time and budget:

“Thanks to InfoZoom, we were able to complete this complex project within 2 years. Without such a tool, we wouldn‘t have been able to achieve the same results within such a short timeframe”

Thomas Reitz, Product MDM, Electrical Sector EMEA at Eaton.

The InfoZoom templates made it easy to get an overview of the historical data stock, consolidate the approximately 5,000 existing attributes, and map the data types and units to the target attributes. “InfoZoom has played a significant role in this data migration project. Without this solution, we wouldn‘t have been able to handle the project,” says Thomas Reitz.

The data migration is currently in the final stages and the go-live of the new PIM database is imminent.

Solutions tailored to individual challenges

Due to the special requirements, InfoZoom is mainly used by selected super users in specific master data department at Eaton, for example, in Product master data management. Meanwhile, InfoZoom has also been used for other use cases such as data quality analyses. The humanIT team supports Eaton in
efficiently accomplishing their objectives with regular workshops and consulting services. Even the most complex issues can be tackled this way. The InfoZoom users at Eaton promote an internal exchange of experiences between each other and also share their expertise with interested colleagues from their business areas in order to support them in the individual analysis of special work packages and requirements.

It’s all about flexibility and creativity

Eaton uses an agile methodology called scrum, which is originally from the field of software development. Contrary to the waterfall model, where all project steps are already precisely defined in advance, scrum focuses on agility. This enables them to design new solutions for specific challenges within no time, to make them quickly available, and then to optimize and develop them further. “InfoZoom is the perfect tool for this flexible and agile approach,” says Reitz. “It allows us to define the milestones of a project more precisely and to readjust the objectives to meet our requirements.”

InfoZoom’s main advantage is that it works like a toolkit. Eaton and humanIT expand the existing functions and develop customized solutions in regular workshops. This way, all functionalities and potentials of InfoZoom can be maxed out. Thanks to its versatility, the software can be used in almost every field, from statistic analyses to document management to license management.

“You do need a certain level of creativity and initiative, but there are practically no limits to the possibilities with InfoZoom.”

The world’s demand for power keeps growing

Today, the world runs on critical infrastructure and technology. Planes. Hospitals. Factories. Data centers. Vehicles. The electrical grid. We are a power management company made up of over 96,000 employees, doing business in more than 175 countries. Our energyefficient products and services help our customers effectively manage electrical, hydraulic and mechanical power more reliably, efficiently, safely and sustainably. By giving people tools to use power more efficiently.
Helping companies do business more sustainably. And by encouraging each and every employee at Eaton to think differently about our business, our communities — and the positive impact we can have on the world.