Ivoclar relies on Pimcore and the 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.

Picture of a dental practice with a screen and the Ivoclar Vivadent platform

Ivoclar is a family-run dental company that is one of the world’s market leaders in the industry. What Ivoclar offers its customers: Integrated solutions from intelligent systems, practical training, sophisticated services, and a lot of attention paid to customer advising. This Liechtenstein dental specialist approached valantic with the following challenge: To unite content, commerce, and community on a single digital platform. The jointly developed solution optimizes the customer experience. It is also fully integrated into the existing IT system environment and thus enables intelligent automation.

Fulfilling global requirements

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:

Data, facts, figures

640

MCHF sales recorded in 2020

subsidiaries and branches worldwide

130

countries are supplied

3.500

employees around the world

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.

The solution

A central platform for everything

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.            

Mockup with screenshot of the Ivoclar Vivadent platform using Pimcore

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.            

Mockup with screenshot of the Customer Academy of the Ivoclar Vivadent platform

Humam AlMukhtar
Director Global Group Integrated Marketing

I greatly appreciate the flexibility and all the time and hard work valantic has invested in this project. It’s obvious how passionate valantic was. Thank you very much to the whole team!

MacBook with screenshot of the Ivoclar Vivadent platform using Pimcore

Pimcore as central technology

Ivoclar decided to use Pimcore as the central back-end technology for both the website and the Customer Academy. Pimcore is an open-source solution that can be used for product information management (PIM), master data management (MDM), digital asset management (DAM), e-commerce, and as a CMS. Ivoclar uses Pimcore especially as a CMS, and for MDM and DAM.

The big advantage of Pimcore is its flexibility. The following systems and work processes were considered in the course of the development and integrated directly:

GoToWebinar for webinars
Azure Active Directory for Ivoclar employees who have access to the administration via single sign-on (SSO)
Salesforce & Pardot to enable marketing automation
SAP Customer Data Cloud (CDC) for a comprehensive view of customer data. CDC allows customers to log on to the various platforms via single sign-on. Other features include progressive profiling and GDPR-compliant data and privacy management.