P&M Agentur Software + Consulting GmbH Named Ibexa Partner of the Month for January
We kick off the New Year by celebrating one of our most long-standing partnerships. Founded in 2002, silver.solutions was a pioneer of digital transformation and developed close links with eZ, the forerunner of Ibexa DXP, to help businesses manage their digital content and build B2B eCommerce platforms.
A lot has changed in the past two decades: silver.solutions became part of P&M Agentur Software + Consulting GmbH, while Ibexa DXP responded to the needs of the market for a technology platform that combined content management with the entire constellation of solutions necessary for successful digital commerce, such as a native PIM solution, fully fledged eCommerce functionalities, a Customer Data Platform, a cloud hosting facility, and more.
What has not changed in 20 years, however, is the excellent relationship between P&M and Ibexa, based on a shared commitment to deliver the best solutions to their mutual clients.
P&M Agentur Software + Consulting GmbH is our Partner of the Month for January.
P&M is a digital agency with offices in Berlin and Hamburg. Its 55-strong team, of which more than 30 are developers, focuses on software development, B2B eCommerce solutions, and AI integration to create digital competitive advantage.
In its long history with Ibexa, P&M has built a strong roster of clients, many of which have been with the agency – and Ibexa technology – for more than 10 years.
The largest of these “legacy” clients is Bürkert Fluid Control Systems, a leading manufacturer of measuring, control, and regulation systems for fluids and gases, active in more than 30 markets across the globe.
“The Bürkert projects mark a milestone,” says Ania Hentz, co-director of Commerce and Digital Experience at P&M, “because it hit the limit of the number of languages the technology allowed you to have. At the time, that limit was 16, but today, the maximum number of languages in the system is 62. This is a good example of how Ibexa’s development roadmap responds to the needs of our clients and the wider market.”
Bürkert continuously strives to improve the digital experience it offers to customers. One of the most recent improvements on Ibexa DXP was the launch of a new “My Bürkert” portal – a headless application that connects with real-time data from the ERP to allow for an intuitive and centralized administration of orders and services.
“A more recent reference project is the multi-shop site for the German arm of Sonic Healthcare, the leading provider of laboratory diagnostic services in Germany,” says Hentz. “The Ibexa functionality that comes to the fore in this implementation is Site Builder, which means that any laboratory that wants to join the B2B shop can do so without asking us. We’ve enhanced the whole thing with an eCommerce plugin to make the process even simpler. With just a few clicks, a laboratory has a complete B2B shop that connects with the ERP system.”
“What we are doing right now for Sonic Healthcare is building a series of B2C multi-shops where end-consumers can send in medical samples and ‘buy’ the analysis which they pay for on the site. Again, laboratories will be able to set up their own B2C shops very easily using Ibexa’s Site Builder.”
Another huge project is the complete overhaul of the website and commerce solution for two purchasing cooperatives, which set up a joint venture to update their eCommerce platforms.
“They are deploying the Ibexa PIM, which is a first for us. This ability to manage very different things such as content and product management, eCommerce, and customer data on one platform is a big selling point for Ibexa DXP. You avoid tricky integrations with third-party solutions, additional licensing costs, and the bother of another vendor relationship.”
True to its pioneering instincts, P&M is one of the foremost drivers in Germany of AI innovation for eCommerce.
“Businesses feel under pressure to adopt AI without always knowing where it might be most effective in their eCommerce workflows,” says Hentz. “One immediately useful application of AI, which we used for the purchasing cooperatives, is in optimizing product data for the PIM.
“A lot of our customers have hundreds of thousands of products and product variations. When you move that to a PIM, you often find that the product data you want to migrate is very unstructured – but a PIM requires structured data, and the search requires structured data. Structuring unstructured data was always a very time-consuming process, but now we use AI to do this.
“You have a text, and hidden in that text, you have the length, width, color, weight, material, or whatever attribute a product has. What AI does is extract the attributes from this text and provide this in different fields for the PIM so we can optimize the data while importing them to the PIM.
“In this way, you minimize 80 to 90 percent of the effort that you would otherwise have to put into designing this process manually with editors and product managers,” says Hentz.
The New Year will also see the launch of another P&M/Ibexa collaboration for a leading manufacturer of batteries.
“Batteries of all types,” adds Hentz, “also for cars and bicycles, so this is a vast B2B shop we are creating for them on Ibexa DXP. In this project, the search is all-important because they have a lot of products. We are integrating the shop with a third-party PIM and Microsoft Dynamics Business Central 365.”
As we have seen with just a handful of eCommerce use cases, every business has its own context and unique requirements – but they all find a home in Ibexa DXP, as implemented and customized by P&M.
“The partnership continues to flourish,” Hentz concludes. “When there are problems we are always able to talk to decision-makers within Ibexa and they listen to us. We can’t ask for more than that.”
“Ibexa has been smart in adapting to what the market wants just like P&M has. Both Ibexa and P&M are coming from a place where innovation, flexibility, and customer outcomes are what matter. This is why our partnership works.”
