Lecot Metaalwaren

Lecot Hardware is a very important player on the hardware market. Lecot searched for a dual solution: to be able to publish their product range towards paper and at the same time towards the Internet. After several trial and errors with other company's, the Lecot company came across Guideline.

Challenge
Lecot has a product range counting over 150.000 articles. Trouble is that even Lecot employees hardly hadn't a clue anymore on what was actually been sold.
To solve this problem, they started out a few years ago by setting up a File Maker pro database structure. The software was developed by an external company. From this basis, Lecot was able to print product sheets to give to customers.
The solution was far from perfect: as soon as the database hit 5000 article entries, the system would stall and be immensely slow.
Lecot had these initial wishes concerning their publications:

• a paper catalogues containing all of their products.
• part catalogues for explicit hardware, like tools
• technical catalogues, to be used with expenditure books.
• CD-Rom with text for expenditure books.
• an extranet that could be used by internal salesmen and by people in the store.
  

At that point, in their search for a solution, which allowed them to publish towards print with relative ease, able to handle multiple languages and a solution able to generate a website, without having any knowledge on ASP, PHP, HTML or XML, they came across Guideline.
The sole condition they had was the ability to maintain and publish their data in-house.

Approach
In this case a prototype was made following house-style and containing a small product selection, store in the Catalogger database. The same was done for the Intranet part. Taking the data stored in the Catalogger database for the prototype as a basis, we offered a dynamic intranet solution as well.
After the prototype, they started a grand project to store all data, imagery, product specifications and expenditure books into the Catalogger Database. The conversion from the old File-Maker database towards Catalogger was a major part of this project.

Solution
To fulfil to the publication needs, Lecot chose the Catalogger/Stentor solution. Taking the lack of a detailed and functional product information system into account, although there was an extensive SAP system available, they decided to store specific info, which was added in the catalogue and on the site, into the Catalogger database as well. From time to time, the Catalogger database is synchronised with the SAP system, to update prices, add new products, barcodes, packaging, etc.

Benefits
The solution based on Catalogger/Stentor surely paid of in the case of Lecot. The updating and maintaining process is fully controllable. In fact, Lecot is able to add and publish new product information on a daily basis, towards print ánd Internet.

Full control and flexibility when it comes to publishing the right data at the right time, at any time will give Lecot the edge over fellow competitors.