Vital Healthcare: From Two Product Updates a Week to a Catalogue That Moves

Vital Healthcare distributes medical, surgical and pharmaceutical products to GP practices, hospitals and clinics across the UK and Ireland, selling through Williams Medical Supplies and five further B2B sites. The business had a PIM nobody could operate and was editing product content by hand in its SAP Commerce back office. It now manages approximately 23,900 products and around 13,900 digital assets in Pimberly, with the whole commercial team enriching products daily.

Project Highlights

23,900

products managed

6

B2B ecommerce sites

386

product attributes modelled

Key Outcomes

Productivity increase: Product updates rose from around two a week

Product updates rose from around two a week to a continous flow run by the commercial team

Product data centralisation: Approx 23k products brought into one system

Approximately 23,900 products and around 13,900 digital assests brought into one system

Single source-of-truth established: One approved record now

One approved record now publishes to all six B2B sites, replacing site-by-site merchandising

Validation workflows enabled: No product reaches a website

No product reaches a website without an image, a description and a named approver

Missing GTINs found by filter in seconds, recovering listings blocked from Google Shopping

Customer Snapshot

Industry: Medical, surgical and pharmaceutical distribution (healthcare)

Headquarters: Dublin, Ireland, with UK operations at Williams Medical Supplies

Founded: Heritage dating back to 1829

Regions Served: United Kingdom and Ireland

Products Managed: ~23,900

Digital Assets: ~13,900 migrated at go-live

Sales Channels: 6 B2B ecommerce sites on SAP Commerce Cloud, plus Google Shopping

ERP: SAP

Pimberly Products Used: PIM, DAM, Vendor Portal

About Vital Healthcare

Vital Healthcare supplies GP practices, hospitals, clinics and emergency care services across the UK and Ireland. Williams Medical Supplies is its largest brand, and the group sells through six B2B ecommerce sites. Its catalogue runs to approximately 23,900 products, from paper consumables and disposables through to diagnostic equipment and pharmaceuticals, described by 386 attributes across five category trees.

The business already had a PIM when the current team arrived, but nobody knew how it had been configured and an upgrade changed nothing. The team switched off its intergrations to the websote and managed product content directly in thr SAP Commerce back office instead. The replacement project then ran through a group-level change of ownership staffed by three people.

Vital Healthcare now enriches every product once in Pimberly and publishes it to all six catalogues, with images, approvals and GTIN coverage controlled in one place.

Business Challenge

The PIM the team inherited had been implemented before any of them joined. Nobody could explain how it worked, months went into reverse-engineering it, and requests to the vendor produced an invoice, not an answer. An upgrade made no difference. The team switched off its intergrations to the website and moved product content into the SAP Commerce back office, maintained by hand by a five-person web team. The commercial team, around twenty people with no digital background, could not be trained on it.

The result was roughly two product updates a week against a catalogue of around 20,000 SKUs. Products sat live with no image, a very short title and no description. Nothing showed which needed attention, so a SKU was fixed only once a customer complained.

Product structure made it harder. A physiotherapy couch available in 32 colours was listed as one product, because only one person in. the business knew how to build variants in SAP Commerce. Missing GTINs had products banned from Google Shopping and finding them meant exporting 25,000 SKUs to a spreadsheet, filtering by hand, then re-importing.

“Our call centre agents would be on a phone with a customer and at the same time on the website of our competitior, looking for product information to give to customers.“

Patrycja Kalkowska, CI & Optimisation Manager, Vital Healthcare

Why Pimberly

Vital Healthcare set out to find a PIM that would meet six requirements:

Replace a PIM the team could neither operate or get support on

Give a twenty-person commercial team a system they would use daily without retraining

Hold medical and pharmaceutical attributes at the depth the products require

Publish one enriched record to every B2B catalogue rather than merchandising site by site

Keep SAP as the master for product creation, with enrichment happening downstream

BManage images, documents and video against products in one place

The deciding factor was who would actually use it. Vital Healthcare put the shortlisted platforms in front of around five people in the web team, twenty in the commercial team and five in IT. The web team had a preference on interface design, but the commercial team had already failed to adopt the SAP Commerce back office, and they found Pimberly the easier system to work in.

That left the obvious objection after a PIM that had not worked: whether a second one would land any better with people who did not consider themselves digital. Around eight commercial users now start their own products, adn staff joining since go-live describe the platform as self-explanatory.

“The usability seems to be easier for the commercial team for Pimberly. So, for us, that was a no branier. If you guys can use it, we’re taking that.“

Patrycja Kalkowska, CI & Optimisation Manager, Vital Healthcare

Previous Tech Stack

ERP
SAP
Ecommerce Platform
SAP Commerce Cloud, six B2B sites
PIM replaced
Agility
DAM
Held in shared folders

Implementation

The project kicked off in May 2025, with phase one covering product creation from daily SAP export, enrichment and lifecycles, the DAM, and release to SAP Commerce Cloud. The Vendor Portal was brought in the same agreement but held back until after go-live, so supplier onboarding never sat on the critical path.

Attribute modelling carried most of the work. Vital Healthcare worked through manufacturer specification sheets to establish what data data existed for medical equipment and chose to build more attributes than the team needed on day one rather than fewer. The build settled at nearly 400 attributes and over 100 taxonomy nodes across three tiers, and five category trees.

While the first few weeks after launch introduced a learning curve for the team using their new platform, this helped them become self-sufficient so that Vital Healthcare now administers Pimberly themselves.

Solutions and Workflows

Product launches now follow one route through the business:

Product creation: The commercial team creates the SKU in SAP ERP, and a nighlty export creates the record in Pimberly.

Enrichment: The commercial team adds attributes and a working description, split acriss pharmaceuticals, disposables and equipment.

Asset management: The graphics team attaches images in the DAM, auto-assigned on filename, with video intergration switching on next

SEO and approval: The SEO team writes the product name, description and metadata, and three to four named approvers release the product.

Multi-catalogue publishing: Category trees push the approved record to all six B2B sites, released nightly to SAP Commerce Cloud.

Features Used

Product Information Management (PIM)

Digital Asset Management (DAM)

Vendor Portal

Product grading

Workflows (automations)

Business Impact

The change Vital Healthcare notices most is that people now want to use the system. Product data had been hard enough to work with that the commercial team had little reason to care. The same team now asks for products to be pushed live and raises problems unprompted. Complaints from customers and leadership about wrong product information have fallen, and the ones that arrive are fixed in minutes.

Vital Healthcare is now rolling out the Vendor Portal with two pilot suppliers, so enrichment requests replace spreadsheets sent by email, and is building product grading rules against images and GTIN coverage to separate products that are merely complete from ones that are good. Video intergration follows in the next deployment.

“Efficiency that’s the biggest improvement in everything that we do, is how quickly we can do it. Also how engaged the team is, because previously it was almost too hard for people to care about it.”

Patrycja Kalkowska, CI & Optimisation Manager, Vital Healthcare

Before and After Pimberly

Before	After
Around 2 product updates a week	Continuous updates across the catalogue
Content edited by hand in the SAP Commerce back office	One enriched record in Pimberly, released nightly
Products live with no image and a one-line title	Image, description and named approval required before release
Variants built by the one person who knew how	Variants built by the whole commercial team
Missing GTINs found by filtering a ~25,000-row export	Missing GTINs filtered in Pimberly in seconds
Smaller catalogues merchandised last or forgotten	All 6 B2B sites published from one category tree