Renfert

The German company Renfert develops and manufactures equipment, instruments, and materials for use in dentistry, and has been a byword for quality and innovation since it was founded in 1925, almost a century ago.

The motto of the privately owned manufacturer, based in Hilzingen near Lake Constance, is “Making work easy”.

“We are committed to fulfilling this promise to the dental technicians and dentists who use our products for the next 100 years,” says Sebastian Herz, Renfert board member responsible for IT and digitalization.

Renfert is a world leader in its sector, but like so many highly modern and successful companies in the German Mittelstand, the technology landscape it had gradually accumulated was fragmented, inefficient, and did not always “make work easy”.

“There was the immediate issue of so-called ‘shadow IT’ where different departments within Renfert, but especially the marketing department, were deploying tools independently, without oversight by IT,” Herz explains.

“A larger challenge was that content and product information management ran on different systems, and that we lacked a single source of truth for our customer communications.”

Renfert’s customers are the resellers and distributors that sell its products in 120 countries. Its end customers are dental technicians and orthodontists. “A common complaint from them, our end customers, was that the Renfert site did not intuitively link product and service information. And then they would ring us for answers, which was a waste of their time and of ours.”

About these end-customers the company knew next to nothing. “There was unanimous agreement at Renfert that we needed to move forward qualitatively with digital transformation as a means of getting closer to our end-users so we could align product development with the needs of the market.”

An indispensable first step was to centralize digital activity on a single platform, Ibexa DXP. “There was never really any question of going for another vendor,” says Herz. “We already ran our content management on eZ [the forerunner of Ibexa] and Ibexa DXP offered the right mix of future-proof functionalities, especially Ibexa Product Catalogue for the PIM integration.”

Renfert regards digitalization as an essential plank of its business strategy going forward. “In this context, return-on-investment is probably not an interesting consideration,” Herz says, “but budget is.”

Herz adds that he did briefly look at the Adobe offerings in this space but was immediately put off by the cost and functional bloat. “They make it quite hard to find out which side of any MarTech stack you could focus on which is precisely the kind of confusion we wanted to avoid. Ibexa made it easy because the main driving points in that regard for me would be PIM and content management, and that’s where Ibexa basically had everything we needed at an acceptable price.”

What did take time was to land on a technology partner that had a clear and convincing roadmap to migrate and store Renfert’s PIM data on its new, centralized system. “We basically asked potential partners to come up with a Proof of Concept for the PIM integration,” says Herz. 

“What impressed us about Logic Joe is that they turned up to the PoC workshop with a prototype version of the PIM implementation of our products. We hadn’t expected this. But the prototype enabled Logic Joe to be very concise and proactive in signposting the challenges of the project right off the bat. Also, the PoC showed that no manual work would be required to import the product data.”

Logic Joe was selected as the technology partner for the project.

“I want to add that Dennis [Herzing, Ibexa Customer Experience Manager] was present at all these workshops, not to advocate for one agency over another, but to support us throughout the process.

A massive selling point is that unlike most vendors, Ibexa wants to get involved in the implementation of its products and has been hugely helpful in its contributions to the project from start to finish.

Sebastian Herz
Board Member at Renfert 

The first phase of this complex project took some 18 months to complete and achieved Renfert’s prime objective of centralizing all customer communications and product data on a single platform. Renfert did not change its branding but website pages were designed afresh and “under the hood” the structure changed completely to allow for the integration of two disparate systems.

“We also took the opportunity to address certain weaknesses, such as search,” Herz adds. “And we know this worked because the volume of customer questions regarding their inability to find a product, service, or spare part has come right down.

“We also made work easier for ourselves because our content editors and product owners now work from one system, there is no redundancy. Before the consolidation of the CMS and PIM functions on Ibexa, the content and product side of things did not match because they had been captured in different structures.

“The only way to remedy this problem is to put everything together in one single system and that is precisely what we did with Ibexa and Logic Joe.”

There is genuine excitement in Renfert about what has been achieved – and about the possibilities that have been created.

Future projects include the development of a customer portal on which end-users could register their device(s) and give Renfert insight into what additional and complementary solutions and services the end-user might need.

At the moment, Renfert manuals are set up in a Word file, laid out in InDesign and then distributed as PDFs which means the data is lost. “What we will seek to do is generate our manuals and the like directly from Ibexa DXP,” says Herz. “We also want to change our approach to translation management and orchestrate our language versions from Ibexa.”

Renfert is evaluating whether an eCommerce presence to sell spare parts directly to its end-market should be on its roadmap. “But this will not be decided in the short term,” says Herz

“The point is, without the migration of our content and product data to the Ibexa DXP platform none of this would even be viable.” 

This project was a necessary huge step towards the digital maturity we want to achieve.

Sebastian Herz
Board Member at Renfert 

Herz concludes by highlighting the support he and his team got from Ibexa as well as from Logic Joe. “In Ibexa we had a vendor who cared, who wanted to be part of the whole project and process,” he says. “That was a new experience for me and one that helped us get off to a great start.

“So if you ask me what is special about Ibexa I would say this: Ibexa’s approach of being in close touch with its end-customers, which is also what we want to do at Renfert, and which Ibexa is helping us achieve.”