Case Study:
Implementing a bespoke, cloud-based Digital Asset Management integration
Holley’s streamlines sales and marketing by automating media access
The business case
For over a century, auto parts manufacturer Holley has operated at the cutting edge of high-performance automotive design. Comprising the company’s own market-leading electronic fuel injection (EFI) systems as well as a family of best-in-class specialist brands, the Holley’s group is recognised as the complete performance solutions supplier of choice for builders, racers and drivers across sports.
As the business has developed, it has built up a vast array of products and solutions – behind which sits an even larger catalogue of part numbers, product data and supporting media. Holley’s recognised an opportunity to centralise the organisation of these assets and information, in a move which would improve accessibility for its teams and ultimately support greater productivity and time-saving.
The vendor decision
Mark Gearhart, Director of Merchandising & Marketing at Holley, consulted IO Integration (a BluprintX company) for advice on how the organisation of this data could be streamlined to meet the needs of its team.
IO Integration recommended that Holley implement a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system which would draw on multiple sources to collate data, information and assets into one easily-accessible portal. Holley, with support from IO Integration, selected Iconik as its ideal DAM solution.
Iconik was the best option available due its ability to seamlessly gather and organise media from any storage, including on-premises or cloud information, and present it as an always-accessible cloud-based system. Iconik also offered built-in automation functionality, which will enable further improvements once Holley is ready to implement deeper marketing automation.
Issue
Across its portfolio, Holley’s holds an enormous repository of data and information. The cumulative product catalogue of its brands is very large, and both present and past products must be accounted for. For example, searching for a single ‘carburetor’ on the Holley system returns thousands of record permutations – and this is just one product type within a much wider collection of solutions for different engines, sizes and more. Small permutations between SKUs such as year of production, make, model and trim must all be trackable in case new actions to a specific unit are required.
On top of pure product information, Holley was aiming to organise its bank of product and promotional visual assets. Each of these, in turn, is associated with a set of metadata which makes it searchable and categorizable; and it was essential that all of this information be imported safely into the new Iconik platform.
Bringing all of this together was a single data source file. This came in the form of a non-standard CSV document containing millions of rows, and hundreds of columns of information associated with each. Ingesting, maintaining and displaying this data with the speed and accuracy required was to be a gargantuan task.
Solution
Seeking an expert consultant to assist with the implementation of its new DAM system, Holley’s did not have to look far. The company had enjoyed a long-standing and successful relationship with IO Integration before the project began, so raising the concept of its new objective came naturally.
IO Integration had also been involved in preparatory stages of the Iconik deployment, including the setup of local and cloud storage platforms which would go on to supply data to the DAM. Thus IO Integration’s familiarity with the specifics of Holley’s data architecture, wider business structures and security requirements all contributed to the manufacturer’s decision – backing up the clear expertise and understanding that IO Integration had demonstrated for DAM projects.
Finally, Holley knew that IO Integration would be capable of delivering much more than simply configuring Iconik and organising its data. The potential for future custom developments and automation projects were discussed, leaving Holley in full confidence that its chosen integrator would continue to be an effective long-term partner.
Approach
IO Integration tailored its approach to ensure the best results for Holley. An initial discovery call was scheduled to capture the full details and requirements for the project, and a subsequent design review session further confirmed the business rules and desired outcomes for the DAM.
Having established the project parameters, IO Integration conducted an internal deployment and quality assurance plan within the Iconik test environment. A successful pilot led to user acceptance testing (UAT) with Mark Gearhart and the wider Holley team to gather specific feedback and ideas.
After incorporating the comments gathered during UAT and a final quality assurance sweep, the DAM was launched into the Holley’s production Iconik environment – a smooth roll-out for all involved.
Objectives
In collaboration with BluprintX, BAE Systems Applied Intelligence established the following project objectives:
- Set up a comprehensive, cloud-based Digital Asset Management system in Iconik
- Represent all product data, past and present
- Collect Holley’s bank of product and promotional visuals, with all associated metadata
- Save time by streamlining information access
- Boost productivity by easing time spent on data processing and recall
- Establish the foundations for future marketing automation projects
- Provide Holley’s team with a ‘single source of truth’ for product information and resources
Outcomes
To deliver for Holley’s, IO Integration needed to find an innovative approach for the extensive CSV file which contained the bulk of the company’s data. The clearest path was to write a dedicated application, purpose-built to process the file in question, by custom-coding a traditional middleware solution. This tactic, however, was simply not applicable within Holley’s budgetary and – more importantly – scheduling parameters. Operating on a strict deadline, IO Integration began to explore low- or no-code options, including Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) solutions.
Most of the iPaaS platforms IO Integration considered suffered from limitations when processing very large amounts of data, as was the case here. The best solution, it turned out, came from an internal IO Integration project. The marketing and creative operations company had been developing its own next-generation IaaS platform: IO AppFlow.
IO AppFlow is an IaaS (Integration as a Service), cloud-native, state-of-the-art, no-limit tech stack for low-code automations. It was the perfect match for Holley’s unique requirements, and compatible with a native relational database which would do the heavy lifting. The CSV file was imported into the relational database, where custom processes were applied to refine the dataset. Traditional iPaaS systems would have moved sequentially though each of the millions of rows across a period of hours, whereas IO AppFlow’s open-ended tech stack and its various toolsets were able to process the dataset in just 20 minutes.
Following the initial success, IO AppFlow was integrated with Holley’s new Iconik DAM to give the company a repeatable method of searching its database and metadata for fast and accurate results.
The dataset processing solution has simplified users’ workflows, with the final system offering a live look-up in which the user can enter the part number they require and have all the related data populate automatically. This ensures that consistent data is available for all assets listed in the Iconik platform. Furthermore, as the system can access asset metadata, traditional search queries are also carried out quickly and effectively.
IO Integration succeeded in delivering a bespoke system based on brand-new IaaS software which met Holley’s objectives and laid the foundations for future developments, all while staying within ambitious time and budget expectations.
“The sheer scale of media and associated data held by the Holley’s family was becoming unmanageable in its existing form. The expertise and dedication offered by IO Integration enabled us to categorise this data into an easily-accessible, cloud-based system. It has improved our processes significantly, and is saving us a great deal of time as we move forwards.”
Mark Gearhart, Director of Merchandising & Marketing at Holley
“This was certainly one of the more challenging projects that IO Integration has been involved with, but also one of the most rewarding. Holley has settled into the new solution really well, and the real-time part number look-up solution is allowing them to maximise both productivity and efficiency while keeping all clients satisfied.”
Dean Holmes, Director of Solutions Engineering at IO Integration (a BluprintX company)