The Granite Group taps Akeneo PIM to let product information flow freely
Thanks to Akeneo PIM, we can now enrich products with higher-quality information more quickly, leading to constant gains.
The Granite Group is a leading full-service wholesale distributor of plumbing, heating, cooling, water, and propane supplies to contractors and fuel dealers. The company can trace its roots to the Central Supply Company, which was founded in 1901.
Over that more than 100 years of service, the company has grown into one of the most trusted distributors in the space. Headquartered in Concord, New Hampshire, The Granite Group serves contractors and fuel dealers across the northeast United States with more than 45 wholesale branches and 15 retail showrooms.
The company only recently began to sell directly to contractors and dealers online via an eCommerce store.
The company first began offering online sales via its eCommerce platform roughly three years ago, but sales struggled to rise to the levels of its wholesale locations and brick-and-mortar showrooms.
What plagued The Granite Group’s digital growth objectives? Poor productivity and product enrichment speeds meant that new products took a long time to get online, robbing the company of precious sales days due to slow time-to-market. It also meant that outdated product information often stayed on its website for long periods, meaning that incorrect product information was reaching customers.
What’s more, the company’s eCommerce site lacked complete, dynamic, and compelling digital assets such as photos and video, which further weakened the company’s product experience. So, with an eye toward boosting online sales, The Granite Group turned to Product Information Management, or PIM, to help them boost productivity and improve their product experience.
Akeneo’s easy-to-understand user interface allowed us to easily train our team to use the software, quickly boosting productivity and accelerating time-to-market.
After considering a number of PIM solutions, The Granite Group elected to go with Akeneo PIM. Matthew Spangler, vice president of pricing and product data at The Granite Group, noted that the company made the decision in large part due to Akeneo’s easy-to-understand user interface, productivity tools, and asset management capabilities.
Akeneo and The Granite Group planned to complete a typical, in-person implementation of Akeneo PIM. But in the days leading up to the scheduled on-site training and implementation sessions, the COVID-19 pandemic reared its head, forcing the group to implement remotely.
Spangler noted that thanks to the Akeneo team’s flexibility and the solution’s ease-of-use, training went on without a hitch, despite the disruption. Within a few short weeks, more than 10 team members, including an outsourced team located in India, were up and running on Akeneo PIM. The benefits of the implementation were readily apparent, with The Granite Group’s team quickly using Akeneo PIM to improve product data quality and speed time-to-market.
eCommerce sales are growing and on track to account for more than 20% of total sales by 2021 - much higher than the industry standard.
Faster time-to-market
Before adopting Akeneo PIM, The Granite Group struggled to enrich product information in a timely manner, which meant outdated product information for existing products and slow time-to-market for new products. But thanks to Akeneo PIM’s productivity tools and easy-to-understand user interface, The Granite Group is now able to easily enrich more than 100 products a day, leading to better product experiences and increased sales.
Higher eCommerce conversion rates
Due in large part to bad product information and poor digital asset management, The Granite Group’s product experience suffered, particularly when it came to online sales. But, by enriching products with high-quality information and digital assets with help from Akeneo’s automation and Asset Manager features, the company was able to boost its product experience, leading to a 33% increase in online sales.
Better prepared to drive future growth
Now that the product experience on its existing sales channels has improved and digital sales are on the rise, The Granite Group sees Akeneo PIM as a key component to help it prepare for future growth be it via catalog expansion, new sales channels, or other means that require rapid, agile deployment of their product information.
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