Reliable product data -
from development to service

OEM bike brands and manufacturers implement the NOCA portal as an industry-specific PLM and PIM system to ensure seamless processes and product data flow across the entire organisation.

A PLM system enables product data management during the development process until production. 

A PIM system enables product data management for commercial teams, who enrich, synchronise and distribute product data across marketing and sales channels.

By connecting these two solution spaces, the NOCA portal ensures that product data flows through the entire organisation without media breaks or the need to build additional interfaces.

You can manage a wide range of data and processes, including:

Data:

• Technical specifications, images, and documents
• Multiple article numbers, versions, and markets
• Descriptions for marketing channels and languages
• Complex pricing models (default and customer-specific)

Processes:

• Product data management (import, enrichment, completion) across product, procurement, marketing, and sales
• Data quality checks and completion
• BOM management: add/delete components, track weight and cost, manage currencies, run logic checks, handle spare parts
• Automated generation of marketing specs and spare parts lists
• Channel management across marketing platforms and languages
• Digital catalogues for B2B sharing
• Workflow automation

The NOCA portal has been implemented across all sizes of bike brands and teams. If you find yourself wasting a lot of time updating and re-entering data across multiple different Excel sheets and still unsure which one is the latest version, it might make sense to schedule a call.

That really depends on how you have distributed tasks and where the data challenges lie.

However, often the problem around product data starts at the beginning of the development journey, when product managers receive information in different formats and structures from suppliers and have to manage these in spread sheets, share points, and ERP systems. Here the NOCA portal serves as a supplier portal, a central database of OEM components, and a solution for BOM development and management that ensures a clear data structure and process from the start.

We have also experienced that the handover from product to go-to-market teams is often associated with a lot of manual work. PMs prepare marketing and sales lists, spare parts list, and a BIDEX list. If anything changes, it has to be updated in five different places. Here the NOCA portal ensures seamless data flow from BOM into a single source of truth for bikes that can be enriched and used by marketing and sales teams.

Then, marketing teams have to make sure that customers and riders see consistent information about products across marketing and sales channels. Connecting websites, online platforms and webshops to NOCA ensures that product data gets updated automatically. Similarly, sales teams can leverage the NOCA portal as a B2B portal for distributors and retailers.

Finally, service is responsible for ensuring maintenance and repairs are done as fast and accurately as possible so riders can get back on the street. The single source of truth and connection between OEM parts, spare parts, BOMs and bikes ensures that support teams can quickly identify the right parts.

Partly. The NOCA portal can be used as a B2B platform, where you can provide product data on-demand and always up-to-date to retailers, distributors and online platforms. However, unlike most platforms, you have full control over who can access what data and there are additional governance layers for individual prices as well as documents.

The NOCA portal is a platform in the sense that you can receive and share data with third parties, but first and foremost it can help you efficiently manage product data inside your company.

The NOCA portal has been specifically developed for the needs of the cycling industry:

• It comes with a harmonised data structure. This means each component category already has a set of attributes assigned to cover all relevant technical specifications. Instead of having to develop a taxonomy yourself, or losing attributes in lengthy description fields, NOCA ensures each data point is in its dedicated field to enable filter, search and automation. This also greatly speeds up the implementation process to improve return on investment.
• Logic and processes are designed with the industry in mind. This is most visible in the BOM development feature, where margins can be tracked, forecasts assigned and different assemblers managed.
• The NOCA portal is automatically interoperable with existing industry data standards like BIDEX, DST and Bike Matrix to reduce manual data transformation work.
• Finally, the NOCA portal enables seamless data exchange with other stakeholders in the supply chain, so that the industry benefits from each new user.

Implementation typically follows these steps:

1. Demo call to explore use cases and current challenges
2. Deep dive to understand your current processes
3. Testing phase — we offer multiple ways to test the NOCA portal for yourself
4. Decision and implementation start

Yes. NOCA integrates with your existing IT landscape, provided your ERP or other systems have an open, well-documented API.

That depends on the functionality and setup of your PIM system and which challenges you are looking to solve.

Standard PIM systems often cover marketing requirements to manage content across different channels. However, you still need to ensure data flows from product and procurement to marketing and sales into your PIM system.

In this instance, you can implement NOCA as a PLM system for your PM teams, and connect it to your existing PIM system. This way, data management during the BOM development is as easy as possible so PMs can focus on building awesome bikes, rather than updating excel sheets. If you want to fix your data at the root, starting here could be a great first step.

There are several ways to add or migrate data:

• Bulk CSV uploads using NOCA templates for parts and BOMs
• Bulk uploads of images and documents
• Manual creation of parts or BOMs directly in the portal in an easy to follow interface
• AI-assisted upload to automatically harmonise and structure imported data
• API connection to other (leading) systems
• Digital catalogues with product data directly from the supplier