AEM as Product Information Management (PIM)
Using Adobe Experience Manager as a centralized product catalog and ecommerce foundation.
Background
Our client, one of the largest electrical equipment manufacturers in India, was operating their digital platform on Sitecore and wanted to migrate to Adobe Experience Manager. The objective was to use AEM not only as a CMS, but also as a centralized Product Information Management (PIM) and ecommerce foundation.
Task
The client wanted to manage products and all related metadata directly within AEM. Product information was provided in structured Excel sheets organized into categories, sub-categories, products, and variants — with variants representing the actual sellable items.
They did not want to manually create pages for each entity. Instead, they wanted authors to upload structured spreadsheets and have the system automatically create and manage the corresponding content and pages.
Solution
- Designed a scalable product ingestion and page generation framework within AEM
- Implemented AEM Catalogs with custom scaffolds for different product structures
- Built Touch UI components and editable templates for catalog and product pages
- Used AEM Tags to manage categories and sub-categories
- Implemented workflows for validation, approvals, and publishing
- Built a custom Excel import utility for structured product ingestion
- Customized AEM Coral UI to provide a dedicated author dashboard
- Built custom indexes to enable fast product search and filtering
- Implemented custom transport handlers for controlled publishing
Results
- Fully automated product onboarding and page creation
- Eliminated manual creation of thousands of product pages
- Improved consistency, governance, and data quality
- Enabled faster product launches and updates