And the Leadership Award goes to…

This year, for this category, we received great submissions and had 3 Akeneo customers short-listed as finalists: 

• Azelis (BE), along with their partner Smile
• Bergfreunde (DE), along with their partner Flagbit
• MTI – Mobile Technologies (US), along with their partner Sitation

Congratulations to all the finalists! But only one can win… 

A winning formulation for Azelis! The 20 years olg group elaborates and markets specialty chemicals in the animal nutrition, food & health, personal and home cares, pharma market segments. They have acquired 7 renowned local and regional brands in the Americas, which provides them a unique go-to market strategy. All of their brands are the best in class distributors in their respective market and offer the highest quality products and technologies supported with application labs and technical service. 

Much more than moving goods, they are moving markets forward. Breaking new ground in their technical laboratories by combining ingredients with ideas and creating opportunities through innovation.

With a product catalogue of over 100,000 base products and unique marketing, regulatory and operational requirements needed to serve 58 countries in various market segments, Azelis was missing the ability to master product data on a global scale while still providing unique product enrichment from a marketing and regulatory/operational perspective.

Compounding this issue is the speed of growth Azelis has experienced due to new distribution mandates and a strong track record of mergers and acquisitions. A centralized platform to master product data connected to disparate downstream systems and supported by one aligned governance structure was critical to expedite time to market for new products and to integrate acquisitions.

Azelis decided to choose Akeneo PXM Studio to support their digital transformation program, with one key goal: to facilitate enrichment of product information by market segment and connect to their online customer experiences platforms on a global scale and maintain their unique sense of innovation.

Becoming a true PXM champion

The largest challenge that Azelis had to overcome was the time taken to create a product which impacted on their time-to-market and responsiveness to customers.

To overcome this the following solutions were found and integrated to the PaaS version of Akeneo PIM Enterprise Edition:

• Creation of business request forms using SharePoint that use workflow to allow validation at the source (e.g. duplicate check) and integration of product reference data. Information from business is automatically transferred into Akeneo.
• Creation of an A.I. based Automatic Data Extraction tool that is embedded into Akeneo. The AI tooling automatically extracts information from non-standard pdf documents attached to the business request form.
• Automatic upload into SharePoint of documents and link to products and to the customer experience platforms
• Near real-time integration

This resulted in internal improvements: 

In the first 3 months, Azelis experienced 50% efficiency gains in processing product creation. By increasing quantity and quality simultaneously this has resulted in 50% less errors thanks to automation, validation rules and workflows.

Azelis has been able to increase its enriched master data by 46% to include information for over 190 attributes including marketing, operations and SHEQ (regulatory and safety) data. They also have marketing information and support input for locale specific values required for regulatory compliance and language translations.

This has definitely reduced the complexity of master data fields within ERP that moved to PIM with the advantage of less maintenance and one single source of truth only.

They have reduced the requirement for ERP licences as well as reduced ERP development & maintenance costs resulting in 0,2M€ savings.

200+ users based in 58 countries and 45 languages now work regularly in Akeneo and speak the same language. Multiple teams can now work simultaneously on the same products.

But this also resulted in external improvements which make you a PXM Champion:

The implementation of the Akeneo PIM Enterprise Edition truly improved connectivity with Azelis’ suppliers and warehouses and has meant faster onboarding of their Merger & Acquisitions projects and new distribution mandates.

And last but not least, from a carbon footprint point of view, Azelis has been able to rationalise their pack-sizes by 37%.

Discover other inspiring customer success stories reading the Expansion Award post, the Accelerator, the Global or the Expansion one.