TENTE

Before implementing Akeneo, TENTE relied on an outdated PIM system that had been in use for nearly 20 years. As product data was created across five global production plants and more than 30 sales locations, newly generated product data quickly became unstructured, inconsistent, and stored in isolated systems, making it difficult to scale across regions. 

Additionally, the lack of interfaces to ERP systems added another layer of complexity. Teams were forced into manual processes when managing data, which were time‑consuming and error‑prone, and without a single source of truth, duplicated information, conflicting data versions, and inefficiencies across teams and markets became common. 

Without this unified product data model, coordinating information globally was difficult, especially when managing content in multiple languages, which prevented the organization from scaling effectively for modern digital commerce and content requirements. 

TENTE soon realized it needed Akeneo PIM to achieve its goals of centralizing and governing product data, creating a foundation for improving data quality, transparency, and global consistency across the organization.

Three years ago, TENTE began a complete modernization of their Customer Experience (CX) architecture, and consequently implemented Akeneo PIM as their single source of truth for all product data, to ensure consistent, high‑quality, and channel‑independent product information from ERP into Akeneo PIM. This transition then allowed them to pull data into their CRM/CPQ, and across all their digital touchpoints, including the website, datasheets, e‑catalogues, and  traditional printed catalogues.

To remove their challenges with manual work, TENTE integrated their new ERP, SAP S/4HANA, into Akeneo, making all relevant master data and product characteristics automatically and consistently available in Akeneo. This eliminated the former manual creation of base data and significantly increased data quality, efficiency, and process reliability.

This new data model in Akeneo follows a fully entity‑based structure. In parallel, TENTE built a fully entity-based data model in Akeneo, using around 80 entities to enrich product records with additional information, enabling clean separation between ERP master data, PIM attributes, and marketing-specific information, a high degree of automation through standardized data relationships, and a drastic reduction of manual maintenance efforts. This integration enables:

• Clean separation between ERP master data, PIM attributes, and marketing‑specific information
• A high degree of automation through standardized data relationships
• A reduction in manual maintenance efforts by an estimated 60-70%

TENTE can now deliver product information efficiently and media‑neutral across all required formats and channels for CAD portals, retailers, and more.

The Result: Keeping the Wheels Turning With Cleaner Data and Faster Content

By prioritizing product data in Akeneo as the single source of truth and eliminating manual base-data creation through the SAP integration, TENTE reduced manual data maintenance effort across PIM, CRM, CPQ, and CMS by an estimated 60 to 70%. This improvement was driven by automated enrichment in Akeneo using around 80 entities, automated datasheet generation with InBetween, and the removal of redundant data entry across multiple systems, resulting in higher productivity, fewer data errors, and faster onboarding of new products.

Simultaneously, TENTE accelerated global content production by five to eight times by managing content exclusively in an EN-UK base locale and using AI for product text creation and machine translation into 28 languages. This enabled global content rollouts in days instead of weeks, improved consistency across markets, reduced reliance on external translation agencies, and shortened time-to-market for product launches worldwide.

Another major outcome of this transition is that around 90% of TENTE’s website content can now be maintained and delivered directly from Akeneo via Shopware. By managing content at the source and distributing it consistently across channels, TENTE can keep product information aligned across the website, datasheets, e-catalogues, and other key touchpoints, while also making updates faster, more reliable, and easier to scale globally.