Bürkert: A Content Delivery Portal for Increased Marketing and Sales Efficiency

Bürkert Fluid Control Systems is a leading global manufacturer of measurement, control, and regulation systems for liquids and gases. With a portfolio of over 30,000 products, Bürkert is the only supplier to cover all components of the fluid control loop consisting of measurement, control, and regulation.

The family-owned company — which has been in business for over 70 years and is headquartered in Ingelfingen in southern German — has an extensive sales network in 36 countries and employs over 3,400 people worldwide.

They established a new goal: serving customer requests quickly and specifically using intelligent information management

Bürkert set itself the challenge of providing the most relevant and up-to-date product information for its customers quicker and more easily. Traditional approaches to information generation fall short in such an undertaking for a few reasons. For starters, product descriptions need to be tailored to the point of view of the clientele, and will then be too different from the descriptions used from the point of view of the company. Beyond that, the requirements of the clientele are too varied and the way product information is being stored is too complex.

The question was: how can Bürkert's comprehensive product portfolio, with hundreds of possible product applications, best be brought together to meet the needs of the clientele? At the same time, it was important to make it easier for employees to compile relevant content and prepare for their next interaction with customers.

The answer was delivered by a content delivery system. This new system consists of:

• The core: a sophisticated logic (semantic network) for linking information units (snippets) and for generating modular customer documents

• A marketing manager backend for automated and media-neutral content creation, as well as for rule-based input into information media, such as application brochures, customer presentations, and internal sales briefings

• A frontend for the sales department for quick retrieval of information

The Bürkert content delivery system was set up in just nine months. Initial effects, such as an increase in internal process efficiency, are already noticeable.