APA has a wide range of customers, including OEM's water pump suppliers and other leading companies in the automotive aftermarket industry. Regarding product data mapping, data exchange, white labelling, and so on, our customers encountered various issues. With the assistance of our expert team, we promptly offered the most effective and optimal solutions to our customers' difficulties.

Customer’s Challenges

● Keeping product information up to date for data exchange according to PIES standards.

● Associating the receiver’s part number in place of the customer’s part number for white labeling during export was a challenge.

● Importing digital assets from their product database for data exchange was cumbersome and time-consuming.

● Requiring the web catalog to project their products in a standardized and impressive way.

● Requiring customer login features integrated with the web catalog to enable customers to log in and acquire the required product details.

● Keeping the website in sync with the PIES (including digital assets) and application information from the PMT.

Steering through the challenges

Mapping product data to the AutoCare standards

The customer's data was standardized by mapping product data against the AutoCare standards, such as mapping the product attributes against standard attributes depending upon the product category the part belonged to, and any other available attributes that were provided by the customer were added as custom attributes to ensure the end user gets the complete information about the provided. The standard and custom attributes are defined depending on the part type to which the attribute (associated with the part number) belongs.

Moreover, the fitments associated with the products were cleaned up to ensure they are valid. Any other fitments that do not satisfy the AutoCare standards but are applicable to the customer were loaded as non-ACES applications.

White-labelling customer's part number

Some receivers want the customers’ products to be white labelled with their part numbers. To enable that, we customized the export functionality to swap the customer's part numbers with that of the receiver's part number.

Import digital assets

The digital assets can be imported to the PMT either in bulk way or through the UI. The bulk fashion supports the import of multiple digital assets to a single part number or multiple part numbers, whereas the UI permits the import of digital asset (s) against a part number. Earlier, the UI supported the import of only one digital asset at a part at once. We enhanced the functionality to permit the upload of more than one image at a time against a part number as per the customer's requirement. This functionality was then deployed to all other PMTs to enhance the product.

Web Catalog

A web catalog that offers just product information was built for this customer. The web catalog offers the users with two types of search filters: the keyword search, which provides suggestions based on the inputs provided by the user, and the Year-Make-Model search filter. The latter is a search widget native to APA. The widget was customized for this customer to include a first level of filters that forces the customer to choose the vehicle type before being able to choose the year, make, or model. As this is a B2B website, it requires the users to log in to the portal to fully access the product details, otherwise, it offers only the basic information about the product can be accessed. The facility to make a purchase from the website is disabled as the purpose is to solve only as a web catalog rather than an ecommerce website.

About APA

APA is an accredited member of the Autocare Association that develops and maintains data standards, best practices, and data research in the automotive aftermarket. Our expertise in data standards helped us resolve our customers’ challenges with ease.

The Product Information Exchange Standard (PIES) is the aftermarket industry data standard for the management and communication of product information. Providing up-to-date product information can help customers find the best replacement parts and accessories for any vehicle with ease and reduce returns, enabling better sales conversions.