Maletti Group

Founded in 1936, Maletti Group is now an industrial conglomerate comprising five distinct companies that hold leading positions worldwide in furniture and equipment for hairdressers, SPAs, and beauty centers.

Before turning to DMA for data synchronization between its ERP Panthera and HubSpot, Maletti Group had already commissioned an analysis of the prerequisites necessary for the integration activity.

The document detailing the process flow envisioned a bidirectional integration, with nearly real-time frequency and seamless continuity between ERP Panthera and HubSpot for contacts, companies, offers, and products/items offered and orders.

The major challenge lay in the fact that Maletti Group already managed contacts for two group brands, Maletti and Beauty Stars, within a single HubSpot account. Particularly complex was the task of implementing a system capable of, through a set of filters and conditions, retrieving HubSpot data from the correct Maletti business unit and then synchronizing it with the corresponding ERP Panthera instance, and vice versa, even in the opposite direction.

The integration requirements

HubSpot was already the CRM of reference for the entire Maletti Group, and the tool through which the company managed marketing and pre-sales activities, such as tracking the openings of commercial emails and sending offer PDFs with opening notifications and dwell time.

When Maletti chose DMA, it did so precisely in light of its experience in implementing HubSpot projects and particularly its ERP Bridge, an application that synchronizes customer data and more transactional data from HubSpot to all on-premises versions of management systems (ERPs).

To kick off this integration, DMA asked Maletti Group’s ERP consultant to create views with Panthera data and thus grant ERP Bridge access to the integration data (Companies, Contacts, Deals, Products, Line items).

The data flow

At the core of the data flow was Maletti's decision to initially use HubSpot as a lead generation tool, employ Panthera for sales activities, and then synchronize the enriched contacts from sales activities—such as offers in PDF format, orders in PDF format, and order items—back to HubSpot. All of this was done with a real-time and constant synchronization frequency.

Once a deal is won, it moves to Panthera, where the corresponding offer is processed, generating an order. The information related to the sent order then returns to HubSpot, including the order number, PDF (the order is added to the offer made in Panthera), amount, and other associated information, such as articles (line items with quantity and price).

A contact can be created on both HubSpot and Panthera, and the logic that allows keeping the two platforms synchronized is similar. For example, on HubSpot, DMA managed this distinction by creating a mandatory field that assigns the contact to one of the two companies via a dropdown menu during creation. Once the contact is created, it passes to Panthera through ERP Bridge's conditions, where it is assigned an ID.

From a technical standpoint, the operation is handled by ERP Bridge, the connector between on-premises ERP systems and HubSpot, developed in-house by DMA and sold on the international market. This solution has been greatly supported by the collaboration of the American multinational, which strongly believes in this solution.

Referring back to the contact creation process, once created, it must be added to the contacts table of a boundary database to be synchronized. The data is then sent to the ERP, which assigns it an ID (ERP code) and updates it with the existing information before sending it back to HubSpot. It's through this numerical sequence that it's possible to distinguish whether the contact belongs to Maletti or Beauty Star.

Final thoughts

Thanks to the integration with ERP Bridge, within one month of work, ERP Bridge was able to connect to Maletti's HubSpot account and, through some decision rules, implement a system of filters that allowed, from time to time, control over which business unit to synchronize data, thus giving rise to a bidirectional synchronization essentially in four directions (Panthera Maletti <> HubSpot Maletti data and Panthera Beauty Stars <> HubSpot Beauty Stars data), which effectively enables Maletti to make significant savings - in the order of thousands of euros annually - on costs related to the potential purchase of a dedicated HubSpot account for Beauty Stars.