Otto Olsen

Otto Olsen is Norway's largest and most complete supplier of seals, technical rubber, transmission products, and other technical industrial products. Founded in 1866, Otto Olsen represents several world-leading manufacturers with a product range that includes goods from over 200 foreign suppliers. The company’s production capabilities allow for designing and manufacturing solutions to any problem—but the company’s extensive stock makes these custom jobs rare. With headquarters in Skedsmokorset, Norway, Otto Olsen has approximately 120 employees.

Data, data everywhere … but none that could be used.

Otto Olsen offers a huge range of products, with over 250,000 items, each one with a little over 1,500 different possible properties. The company was awash in aging catalogs, and the Excel files holding product descriptions and product pictures were separate. Even worse, variants of different items were displayed in in their current system as individual items, making it difficult to navigate, and even more difficult to provide customers with the information about the products they needed to place an order.

“We didn't have anything you could call a system. Nothing worked in what we ran before," said Erlend Gunnulfson Hegna, product manager at Otto Olsen. “It was poorly adapted to our business processes, and it was poorly implemented. We realized that it was unsustainable, so it was easy to make the decision to invest in something new.”

In addition to a completely new PIM solution, Otto Olsen also needed a new web shop that could be used in B2B trade in a flexible way. The goal was to get a more manageable product catalog—both from an internal, administrative perspective, as well as from an external, customer perspective. They wanted their customers to be able to access product information and place orders online.

Erlend and team launched a a project, and ultimately landed with Gung.

"When we decided it was time to change, we sat down and wrote down everything we were looking for, both in a PIM solution and for a web shop,” he said. “We got proposals back from a number of vendors, but we chose Gung for a couple of reasons. One was our desire to leverage the product data and processes we had already invested putting into our ERP system, not to mention the knowledge the Gung team could contribute there. Another part of the decision was purely about price.”

The journey—from concept to launch

The project to implement the new PIM system and to build the webs hop began just before the pandemic hit with full force. Otto Olsen only managed to get a visit from Gung once before all the work had to be managed remotely, with Otto Olsen in Norway and Gung in Sweden. Erlend didn’t think it matered.

"During the entire project, we have had good cooperation,” he said. “We feel that it has worked well with good communication and good support—even remotely.”

To get the new PIM system up and running, Otto Olsen needed to collect all product data for all 250,000 items, while Gung worked to make it easier for the product managers to get all the information into the new system in a way that would meet Otto Olsen's needs of organization and streamlining and reducing administrative work in the future.

The large product catalog placed high demands on the performance and functions of the new PIM system. They chose to create product families, or concepts, to group the articles that had different variants and thus make the new webshop easier to navigate. The result is that all data is now stored in a central database. The days of Excel sheets were finally over.

The great work Otto Olsen put into compiling all the product data has impressed the Gung team. “Their effort was very impressive, and this part of the implementation is often underestimated,” commented Daniel Göhlin, CEO at Gung. “In any project like this, the customer will get out what he puts in—and then some. The Otto Olsen team definitely achieved this.” 

Otto Olsen's new B2B web shop went live in mid-October of 2021, and people have already started to see the benefits.

 “The response we have received from our customers since we went live has been very positive,” said Erlend. “Even though we still have some way to go before everything is completely finished, we are very satisfied with the results we see so far.”

Best Thing About Gung? Go!

When pressed to single out the one thing that sets Gung apart, Erland pointed to the team’s deep product knowledge—not only on Gung, but also on their ERP system Jeeves.

"If one thing should be highlighted a little extra, it would probably be the knowledge Gung has of both Jeeves and PIM systems,” he said. “This knowledge has led to very good conditions for the project. We were able to get the support and help we needed during the journey. When we asked questions or made suggestions, we quickly received an answer back as to whether or not it would be possible to implement. This level of cooperation is something we really appreciated.”