Steelcase is the recipient of the 2025 Accelerator Award for their remarkable achievements in streamlining product data management and accelerating time-to-market.
Before Akeneo, managing our data was entirely dependent on IT, with business users unable to make updates independently. Today, thanks to Akeneo, both internal and external business users can seamlessly manage and enrich data without any technical support. This shift has empowered our teams, streamlined collaboration, and freed IT to focus on high-value initiatives.
Steelcase, a global leader in office furniture and accessories, has been revolutionizing workspaces for over a century. With a focus on sustainability and human-centered design, Steelcase develops products that enhance work experience and productivity. The company partners with architects, designers, and businesses worldwide to create innovative work environments that meet the evolving needs of modern workplaces.
We are excited to announce that Steelcase is the recipient of the 2025 Accelerator Award for their remarkable achievements in streamlining product data management and accelerating time-to-market. By leveraging Akeneo Product Cloud, Steelcase has transformed its approach to handling supplier data, reducing inefficiencies, and optimizing product enrichment, drastically improving data, accuracy, automation, and operational efficiency to set a new standard for product information management in the office furniture industry.
Steelcase used to rely on a legacy PIM system that created significant inefficiencies, frustration, and manual work. The rigid system lacked key features required to support the company’s complex product catalog, leading to reliance on spreadsheets for managing surface material data.This approach made it difficult to scale, prone to errors, and tedious to maintain.
A major challenge was linking digital assets such as images, swatches, and color representations to their respective finishes. Without an automated system, teams had to manually associate each asset with multiple regional records, resulting in inconsistent data and a time-intensive process. Given Steelcases’s extensive range of finishes, textures, and paints, this was a significant burden on internal teams.
Multi-regional management further compounded these challenges. Each product SKU required updates across three separate regional records, which required extensive manual labor to ensure accuracy and slowed the enrichment process while also introducing a high risk of discrepancies between regions.
Supplier data management was another key bottleneck. Without an efficient way to integrate supplier data, teams spent over 33 hours annually manually loading information. The lack of direct access for external stakeholders meant Steelcase’s internal teams had to act as intermediaries, increasing inefficiencies and slowing the process of updating product details.
Centralized Product Data and Automated Asset Management
O2 Commerce served as the PIM integration partner for Steelcase, leading the end-to-end implementation of Akeneo Product Cloud to support the company’s complex product data requirements. Their team collaborated closely with Steelcase to architect a scalable solution, configuring key capabilities such as Supplier Data Manager (SDM), automated asset linking, and a centralized framework for managing multi-regional product catalogs. By aligning taxonomy, data governance, and enrichment workflows across internal and external users, O2 Commerce enabled Steelcase to reduce manual workload, accelerate time-to-market, and enhance overall data quality.
With Akeneo implemented, Steelcase eliminated reliance on spreadsheets and manual processes by creating a single source of truth and ensuring all product information is now accurate, up-to-date, and easily accessible. One of the most significant advancements has been their ability to automatically link assets such as images, textures, and color representations to specific finishes, which has eliminated the need for manual uploads and allows teams to focus on high-value tasks while ensuring visual consistency across all product records.
Streamlined Supplier Data Management with SDM
Steelcase leveraged Akeneo’s Supplier Data Manager (SDM) to transform the way supplier data is processed and imported. Instead of spending hours manually inputting data, the system now cleanses and validates data before ingestion into Akeneo, allowing Steelcase to achieve a 62% reduction in annual time spent loading supplier data, from 33.36 hours to just 12.14 hours.
Optimized Time-to-Market for Product Releases
With automated workflows and improved data accuracy, Steelcase significantly accelerated the time-to-market for now products, including:
Enhanced Multi-Regional Product Management
Steelcase also addressed the inefficiencies in managing multi-regional finish records. Instead of manually updating data across different regions, Akeneo now synchronizes updates in real-time, resulting in a 67% increase in efficiency when managing key product details across multi-regional finish records.
Steelcase’s success exemplifies what it means to be an accelerator—moving faster, working smarter, and delivering superior product experiences at scale, which is precisely why they were honored with the 2025 Accelerator Award.
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