Keesing Media Group (KMG)
Cross-border growth for Europe’s biggest braintainment company with a PLM
As Europe’s market leader of puzzles and braintainment games, Keesing Media Group (KMG) produces over 100 million puzzle magazines each year. Their head office is based in Amsterdam, but they have always set their sights near and far. That’s how they have won the hearts and minds of millions of print and digital puzzle players across Europe.
Many major brands sell their puzzles, including Denksport, Sanders, Sport Cérébral, Tankesport, PuzzleLife, Megastar, Jan Meulendijks, 10 voor Taal and Win! From their printed books to their digital versions and apps, Keesing has puzzles to suit every interest and age. The company is active in 15 countries and is well known for its Sudoku puzzles. With their ambitions not to only conquer the European market but also the e-commerce world, Keesing was looking for a partner who could help them with their digital transformation to support their growth and manage their product enrichment this is where Youwe came in.
Keesing is active in a lot of different markets and has a lot of different products to offer. The challenge the company had was that they wanted their products in an ever-changing market managed together with their product lifecycles and workflows. They also wanted to manage their offers and campaigns for their online shop in a central data hub and both the Product Information Management and e-commerce capabilities needed to be integrated with the current Keesing architecture. Most importantly, they wanted a digital transformation to support their growth.
With their ambitions not to only conquer the European market but also the e-commerce world Keesing was looking for a partner who could help them with their digital transformation to support their growth and manage their product enrichment this is where Youwe came in.
Our solution
Product Lifecycle Management
The initially anticipated PIM grew to a true Product Lifecycle Management solution supporting the complete flow for all of their publications and feeding their e-commerce platforms. A Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solution makes sure the process of managing the entire lifecycle of a product runs smoothly. The project has a significant complexity and many integrations. Together with the PLM, the project resulted in a good challenge. Youwe’s role in the project was to advise on and build the Product Information Management system, which could be used for multinational multi-brand purposes. We chose Pimcore because of the following reasons:
- Flexible data model
- Powerful object and data relations
- Complex workflows
- Flexible integration
- OOTB PIM features
- OOTB DAM features
E-commerce to go global
We also designed and built a multi-language, multi-country, multi-brand Magento e-commerce consumer store where subscriptions, issues, and packages can be ordered. Magento is the market leader in the field of e-commerce software. The robust application framework has excellent integration options and the rich set of marketing tools made Magento the perfect solution for Keesing.
A fully integrated platform
The PIM system is integrated with the ERP of Keesing. But that is not the only integration the team made. The Keesing platform is fully integrated. Some of the integrations are Cover Manager, which provides the product images via the API, the team also created an integration to provide data for BI via the API, and they have several exports to Magento (products, attributes, campaigns, and special offers). On Magento's side of things, there are also some integrations with a few fulfillment partners and a marketing cloud to take their e-commerce platform to the next level.
The results
The project went live recently and is immediately showing benefits and results for Keesing.
