1. Master Data Management
prerequisite for fast growth
Menno Vis
21 March 2013

2. Who am I?
Menno Vis
Head of Software
Development Department

3. Agenda

4. Famous in
Holland!
Number 1 online shop in
NL; growing fast in B
(books, entertainment, electronic
s & domestic appliances, toys &
baby, kitchen & cooking, health &
beauty, pets, gardening, DIY)
One of the best visited
websites in NL
Competition:
• International
e-commerce companies
• Local stores

5. A short history
Born in 1999
Revenues bol.com in Mio EUR
Omzet in Mio Euro
355
304
268
224
171
Our mission
107
71
51
26 35
2 11 18
Part of Ahold
1999
2001
2002
2004
2005
2006
2007
2009
2010
2000
2003
2008
2011
since 2012
Grown very fast

6. From media to department store
1999 2000-2003 2004-2008 2009-2010 2011 2012
New categories
Small Baby
Appliances
Books
Health
Electronics
& Beauty
Appliances
Entertainment Toys Cooking
& Dining
New business
& channels
2nd hand Digital reading Plaza Mobile 2.0
International
expansion
Belgium

7. Bol.com in België
75% Vlamingen kent bol.com
300.000 Belgische klanten (x2 vs 2011)
NPS in Belgie is hoger dan NPS in Nederland

8. Agenda

9. Sometime early 2010…
– Bol.com growing fast
– The completeness
and correctness of
our product data had
to be improved
– The time and effort
required to add
content information
from new suppliers
should be decreased
– A need for
flexible, robust and
scalable processes
and tools

10. 2010  New
Catalogue Project
Start working with…

11. Objectives of NCA
• Scalability (to be able to manage >25M products)
• Improve onboarding suppliers
• Enhance content data quality by advanced technology
• Provide (much) more functionality needed on short or
long term
• Higher level of automation

12. High amounts 
complexity
10M+ (growing to 25M)
Average no. of attributes
per product: 250+ (and
max 1000)
100+ automated supplier
connections
50+ users
10+ product groups

13. Agenda

14. STEP@bol.com
Supplier
A STEP
Product & Content
Supplier
B
Talend DHPC WSP
ETL Datahub Webshop
Supplier
C
POS
Offersysteem
Supplier
D
Pricing & availability

15. STEP is key component

16. MDM for bol.com
STEP 5.2
Import
Mgr / MMP / Exports to
Manual Other
Data Activities Systems
Quality

17. Characteristics of
STEP@bol.com
• STEP (by Stibo Systems) is the content system for bol.com
• Most content is provided by many suppliers in a fixed format.
This is loaded automatically into STEP as supplier data.
• The supplier data is automatically translated and transformed
into – for bol.com – relevant information: bol.com content.
• Match; Make; Promote
• Bol.com content can/will also be enhanced manually. Wizards
are created to support this.
• The bol.com content is hence the 'best' content (“Master Data”)

18. Import Mgr / Data Quality
Many Suppliers
Retrieve Data (via FTP)
Process Data (via Talend)
STEP Import Manager
STEP Data Quality Module
Supplier Product Info; ready for MMP
18

19. Match and Make first step of
MMP
Match &
Promote Approve
Make
Step 1
• The process starts with Match & Make
MMP is required to transform supplier data into bol.com content.

20. Promotion is the second step
of MMP
Match &
Promote Approve
Make
Step 1 Step 2
• The process starts with Match & Make
• Afterwards the promotion process is initiated

21. Match, Make & Promote in 3
sub steps
Match &
Promote Approve
Make
Step 1 Step 2 Step 3
• The process starts with Match & Make
• Afterwards the promotion process is initiated
• It ends up with an approval of the object(s)
 Now we have the ‘golden bol.com product’
(Master Data)

22. Manual activities
•Next to the automated
processes we can also
enhance the data
manually.
• Splitting and merging
wizards have been
developed to support all
business rules

23. Results
• Time reduced for adding a new product
category
• Time reduced for adding (new) automated
supplier content
• Increased fulfillment rates
• Less order cancellations
• Improvements to bol.com Plaza
(marketplace) made possible

24. The future
• We are finishing the implementation of STEP MDM
for all other remaining product groups
• We will work on templates, standards and other
tools to automate product information management
further
• We will continue to grow the STEP MDM solution
and enhance the data model further.
• bol.com will continue to invest in the relationship
with Stibo Systems in order to have our
requirements included in new releases of STEP
MDM 

25. Agenda

26. Conclusion
The MDM journey doesn’t
stop.
Growth leads to new
challenges.
STEP by Stibo Systems will
help us to make this
journey.