While customers can look and touch items in the store, in e-commerce comprehensive product information and images of the product help customers to make a purchase decision. In addition to a simple product image, images of product details and photos or videos showing the article in use should be presented. Grube KG offers about 25.000 products in its webshop and for almost every product there are several pictures. Grube itself shoots usually twice a year and also uses pictures of the brands on offer. In addition to pure product images, there are also additional images that the marketing team uses for other purposes - for example on the company's social media channels or in the printed product catalogue.

„In the past, all images were simply stored in the file system and were sorted away in a classic folder structure. and the images were named after the article number," says Alexander Zindler. „If a picture had been used for three articles, this system meant that the picture was stored three times with the new article number. That's when our computers got confused and had problems reading more than 30,000 files in a directory properly," says Zindler. Especially the marketing department had difficulties to find pictures again: „Every time we needed a marketing picture somewhere, we had to look through 5000 pictures manually hoping to find one that matched our expectations." To change this situation, Mr. Zindler quickly realized that in addition to the Product Information Management System (PIM), which manages all product data centrally, a larger Digital Asset Management System (DAM) was required to manage the images and other media files. After the implementation of another provider's DAM system failed because many workflows could not be implemented as expected, Mr. Zindler became aware of the Cavok DAM system through a recommendation:

Cavok is used to automate workflows, store data centrally and avoid duplicates, thus making collaboration with internal and external colleagues easier, even across different locations. A special feature of Cavok is its ability to be deeply integrated into other software solutions such as web shops or PIM systems. Its unique architecture makes it a collaboration software and central exchange point for all digital assets. With the help of the metadata stored on files and intelligent search functions, classic hierarchical folder structures can be resolved in a DAM system. With Cavok, metadata can be configured individually. At Grube, a pure product image is only keyworded with the product's article number. Product and image are then automatically linked with each other in the PIM system. The situation is different with marketing images, explains Alexander Zindler: „An image that can also be used for other marketing purposes is given a keyword so that we can retrieve it later in a search.

„What surprised us most about Cavok was how well the system fitted into our desired target workflow. We only needed a few technical adjustments, most could be solved with Cavok's standard functionalities, which then led to the rapid implementation of the project," concludes Alexander Zindler. „Thanks to the clear keywording, you can now find the right picture or a suitable selection of pictures directly during a search, which saves us
an enormous amount of time." Mr. Zindler is also impressed by an additional integrated feature: The keywords entered for the marketing images are automatically translated into English and Swedish, so that international colleagues can find images quickly. With the recent update to version 4.3 of the DAM system, Grube KG now also benefits from the possibility of attaching metadata to folders or categories. These are automatically inherited by all files in the folder or category and thus save time in keywording - especially in the case of images that depict several articles. These can now be easily assigned to multiple categories and automatically receive all elevant keywords for the products shown. Since the introduction of Cavok, these and other functions have saved the employees of Grube KG a lot of time when searching for files. Valuable time that can be invested in optimising the online shopping experience for their customers and used for faster processing of enquiries.