The Story
Klaus is a Category Manager. His job: source products for 1,300 stores across 8 countries. Impressive, right?
His reality: proving that cleaning supplies that have been given wildly different identities by suppliers who speak different languages and live in different regulatory universes could be compared.
Today’s battle: all-purpose cleaners. Henkel calls theirs “Universal-Reiniger 1L.” Unilever went with “Nettoyant Multi-Usage 1000ml.” The price king is a Chinese supplier whose “Multi-Surface Cleaner Professional Grade” has a safety data sheet in creative English.
Klaus opens his matching spreadsheet — 73 tabs of multilingual chaos. He cross-checks that German “Tensid 5-15%” equals French “Agents de Surface 5-15%” equals Chinese “Surfactants 5-15%.” Then verifies REACH compliance, RoHS certificates, and technical specs that range from Germanic precision to Shenzhen optimism.
Next in line is ‘Mikrofasertuch Blau’. Could this one be the same as the “Niebieska ściereczka z mikrofibry” with the expired ROHS certificate?
Two hours later, Klaus has matched 31 products. The Chinese safety sheets are fascinating fiction. The German specs read like PhD dissertations. Half the Polish catalog remains untranslated.
Only 9,969 SKUs to go.
The solution
- Parse the whole catalog in a useful way
- Search across language barriers
- Consolidate the terminology in your language of choice
- Convert measuring units and systems on the fly
- Restructure datasheets to match a minimum required parameters and highlight the differences
- Find the right price on the things that matter for you
- Always start small, and build trust on your way up!