Headquartered in Covington, Louisiana, Pool Corporation (POOLCORP) is the world’s largest wholesale distributor of swimming pool supplies, equipment and related leisure products with a long and distinguished history of customer service coupled with quality products. The company currently trades on the NASDAQ stock market under the ticker POOL. POOLCORP’s inventory includes a diverse range of products, from construction materials, replacement parts and fencing to pool care products and spas, with roughly 80,000 wholesale customers around the world. The company operates over 290 locations worldwide with more than 3,200 employees.
The Challenge
POOLCORP sought to implement a digital asset management system as a centralized repository of all digital assets for marketing, internal sales and external customer use. The company needed a centralized repository of images and media for delivery to the company’s customer base of wholesale dealers via its public facing B2B portal, Pool360. The digital asset management system would manage various digital assets and metadata including technical specification manuals, owner’s manuals, marketing materials, logos, product images and schematics in a centralized and secure repository.
In February of 2011, POOLCORP selected Chuckwalla v6, a digital asset management system developed on the Microsoft .NET platform, as the foundation for the digital asset repository. To implement the digital asset management system and connect it to the company’s existing business systems, POOLCORP sought a technology partner with both digital asset management and Microsoft .NET development expertise. POOLCORP hired DPCI to provide the digital asset management implementation and enterprise application integration services to incorporate Chuckwalla into the company’s infrastructure.
Solution
DPCI met with key POOLCORP stakeholders, across departments, to elicit functional requirements for the configuration and customization of the new digital asset management system. The Chuckwalla professional services completed a ‘certified’ vendor installation of Chuckwalla v6 for development, staging and production environments. The DPCI team then configured Chuckwalla to meet the functional requirements. Once the installation and configuration was complete, DPCI provided Chuckwalla training to end users and administrators from the Information Technology, Software Development, Sales & Marketing, Catalog & Data, and Graphic Design departments.
Using MS SQL stored procedures and the Chuckwalla Hot Folder Utility, DPCI developed a Windows Service to integrate the digital asset management system with POOLCORP’s MS SQL Server data warehouse for all product metadata. The Hot Folder utility allowed bulk upload of assets while the Windows Service called the stored procedures to update each SKU asset with the metadata from the matching record in the data warehouse. This metadata from the data warehouse was synchronized with the Chuckwalla database on a daily basis so that each SKU asset within Chuckwalla had the most up-to-date information.
In addition, using Web Services and the Chuckwalla API framework, DPCI integrated Chuckwalla with POOLCORP’s DotNetNuke B2B portal, Pool360. Through the integration, the public user community could search and retrieve digital assets housed in the Chuckwalla digital asset management system directly from within Pool360’s front end interface.
Finally, DPCI’s development team worked alongside the POOLCORP development team to build a Microsoft .NET Web application that tied together product information from the data warehouse and digital assets from Chuckwalla to provide a single interface from which authorized users could manage all product content.
The Result
POOLCORP now has an organized, central repository of product images, related materials and associated metadata that is needed to market the company’s products. DPCI’s digital asset management and enterprise application integration experts helped POOLCORP build an integrated solution that allows authorized users ways to view and manage product data from a single interface and deliver the most up-to-date imagery, specifications and supporting material to its customer-facing Web portal.
Find out more about our digital asset management services or submit your inquiry to info@databasepublish.com. We look forward to hearing from you.
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