Ivoclar uses Pimcore & SAP Customer Data Cloud

Content, commerce & community united

ivoclar vivadent is a family-run, global manufacturer of dental materials. The Liechtenstein-based dental company approached valantic with the following challenge: bringing together content, commerce and community on one digital platform. The jointly developed solution significantly improves the customer experience. What’s more, it was fully integrated into the existing IT infrastructure, allowing for intelligent automation.

Result

Ivoclar commissioned valantic to design and develop a central platform – and it is more than satisfied with the result:

A central corporate website with Pimcore as a global CMS system, highly complex in terms of countries, rights, and languages
An integrated e-commerce area based on SAP Commerce Cloud
Launch of a new Customer Academy, where many processes run automatically

About Ivoclar

Whether as professionals or people – Ivoclar helps dentists, dental technicians, and dental hygienists make good on their promise and their passion: To ensure the best possible oral health and quality of life for people today and tomorrow. This Liechtenstein-based company is one of the world’s leading providers of integrated solutions for high-quality dental applications. Comprehensive product, system, and service offerings, intensive research and development, and a clear commitment to training and further education form the basis for the company’s success.

Making people smile. This is Ivoclar’s mission, which it pursues with passion. The following data, facts, and figures confirm this:

Photo of a woman and a man during a consulting session

The challenges

Ivoclar’s innovative system solutions are often very complex. This makes sales advising-intensive and professional applications often require supporting training content. That’s why Ivoclar has an e-learning portal through which dental technicians and dentists can book courses and earn certifications.

Challenge number one: Previously, the registration, administration, and certification in the background had been handled manually and thus produced a lot of administrative work. Customers were requesting a state-of-the-art platform on which these processes could be handled automatically in order to leave more time for customer advising and acquisition.

Picture of a woman and a man during a consulting session

Challenge number two: Ivoclar supplies products to more than 130 countries worldwide. As a result, the company has a total of 36 geographically local websites, which are run in the back end via several Content Management Systems (CMS). The consequence: Enormous administrative effort. To simplify matters, all websites will now be merged onto a central platform and made available via a global CMS.

The method

Ivoclar and valantic have a long-standing partnership. That was the ideal basis for defining an overall strategy, including goals and timeline. Existing requirements from Marketing, IT, and Business were recorded in a structured manner, grouped, and prioritized according to their benefit and the work required. The joint recording of touchpoints, processes, and systems along the customer journey helped the company to better understand dependencies. This made it clear how closely certain systems such as Salesforce, SAP CDC, Pardot, etc. are connected and that some content was missing in strategically important locations.

After the two-month design phase came the nine-month agile development phase. During this time, Pimcore was set up as the back end and the front end was developed with vue.js. What followed were regular tests and customer validations in order to be able to incorporate market feedback into the further iterations in a timely manner.

Launch of an extensive platform

Content, commerce, and community have been united – and how: In addition to merging the individual websites, e-commerce has been integrated into the new website and the Customer Academy has been re-launched. At the same time, there was a rebranding of the entire online presence.

Rights, country, and language system

From now on, the corporate website and Customer Academy can be maintained centrally in the back end via Pimcore as CMS. The special feature is definitely the highly complex rights, country, and language system. It consists of a total of 36 different language/country combinations and has been integrated seamlessly into the existing system environment. The same applies to the entire e-commerce sector, which valantic had already developed in previous years based on SAP Commerce Cloud.

Customer Academy

The Customer Academy offers the possibility to book training courses online, register for on-demand webinars, and even complete courses including certification. Dentists and dental technicians can collect credits via the "CE" portal and obtain certification from the International Center for Dental Education (ICDE). The processes have been adapted so that most of them run automatically. This frees up valuable capacities for sales and in-house services, which can be used, for example, for more intensive customer advising.