Rubinetteria Paffoni: a more powerful platform for data, catalogues and digital content

This is exactly what happened at Rubinetteria Paffoni, a historic Italian company specialising in the production of high-quality bathroom and kitchen taps. The company was managing its product data through a platform that had reached the limits of its capacity. Internal processes required increasing effort, manual management in Adobe InDesign for catalogues and price lists led to recurring errors, and the growing number of product variants made the data structure difficult to scale.

This situation is more common than one might think: having a PIM (Product Information Management) system does not necessarily mean having chosen the right one for your business, especially when requirements increase and the system can no longer keep up with the pace of innovation.

From this awareness came Paffoni’s decision to enhance its digital transformation journey with GMDE, to regain control, speed and data consistency across all internal and external phases of the production cycle and across all channels where the product comes to life.

GMDE’s response was immediate and targeted: migrating the existing setup to a single, scalable and integrated ecosystem for data, digital assets and digital content.
At the heart of the new infrastructure is the PIM, which now manages over 17,000 items, including products, collections and series. Alongside this sits an advanced DAM (Digital Asset Management) system, capable of collecting and making available around 23,000 digital assets, including images, videos and multimedia resources. Overseeing data quality is the MDM (Master Data Management) layer, ensuring metadata consistency and quality – an essential condition for any omnichannel evolution.

Around this architecture, GMDE developed a range of bespoke features and customisations. The data model was rebuilt from scratch, transforming XML and Excel files into a coherent and modern structure able to interact with the entire company ecosystem. Recursive asset imports from an external file server ensure automatic content alignment, while integration with Adobe InDesign has radically changed the way editorial content is produced: catalogues and technical sheets are now generated directly from the data in the PIM, ensuring immediate consistency across all information sources.

In parallel, GMDE also developed the new CMS (Content Management System), based on Pimcore, designed to receive data in real time from the PIM, ensuring full consistency between what Paffoni publishes online and what it produces for print.

During the journey, Paffoni expanded its digital vision by requesting further enhancements. In just two weeks, GMDE trained the internal team on PIM usage, data cleaning and automated catalogue generation, enabling company resources to become autonomous in day-to-day management.

At the same time, key elements of the website’s user experience were updated: more visual layouts, advanced filters and optimised product pages designed to provide quick access to documents and assets. The old, static and unintuitive listing was transformed into a modern, e-commerce-oriented interface.

GMDE also handled the migration of the entire infrastructure to Equinix with speed and precision, completing it in just three days while ensuring operational continuity and stability, without slowing down the path to go-live. A result that confirms a distinctive strength: GMDE’s value lies not only in implementing the solution, but in its ability to customise it, support it and guide the client company through every phase of the digital journey.

Today, Rubinetteria Paffoni can rely on a platform that works transparently and consistently, reducing manual activities and increasing team efficiency. Every change made in the PIM is quickly propagated to the CMS and editorial tools, ensuring complete consistency across catalogues, technical data sheets, online product pages and the website.

The new organisational model allows data to be entered once and reused in any context, significantly reducing production times. The multilingual structure already opens the door to international markets, while the modular CMS enables the internal team to independently manage even complex pages.

In light of the results achieved, Paffoni has already expressed interest in continuing with further developments, confirming its trust in GMDE. A natural evolution towards fully integrated data management, further strengthening the efficiency of editorial and commercial processes.

The journey undertaken by Rubinetteria Paffoni demonstrates a simple but often overlooked truth: it is not enough to have a PIM – you need the right platform. When legacy systems slow down innovation, it is essential to choose an infrastructure capable of growing with the company, not the other way around.

GMDE guided Paffoni through this transformation starting from a clear principle: data quality is the foundation of digital competitiveness. And today, Paffoni has a solid base on which to build its omnichannel future.