Akeneo PIM Helps Turner Price Create A Delicious Digital Experience
Akeneo PIM has revolutionized our approach to sales and marketing.
Founded in 1992, Turner Price spent nearly three decades as part of the hidden backbone of the catering and hospitality industry, serving as a food wholesaler to restaurants, cafes, hotels, schools, and care homes around the U.K. The company built its business by establishing relationships with customers via field sales, phone orders, and catalog sales. These relationships tended to be long and fruitful, with most of the company’s customers becoming loyal return buyers making purchases over the course of several years.
As the company looked to continue its growth in an increasingly competitive foodservice market, Turner Price decided to open a digital offering. In 2015, the company opened its virtual doors at turner-price.com, allowing its restaurant and catering customers to buy nearly 4,000 different items and ingredients to help create delicious meals.
Today, Turner Price is looking to grow their business without the traditional investment in physical infrastructures such as inventory, warehousing and delivery vehicles. Instead, the business is re-distributing budgets to allow for digital expansion via a dropship/marketplace model and third-party logistics.
After spending decades building a successful business on the back of its relationships with restaurant customers, Turner Price saw an opportunity to innovate and grow its business through technology.
Turner Price’s digital strategy aimed at creating a classleading digital self-service environment for its customers, expanding its product range, and ensuring that customers always have access to accurate and compelling product information. Despite these lofty ambitions, Turner Price lacked the technology required in order to deliver these improvements to their customers.
In particular, existing product management and enrichment processes were slow and expensive, making it impossible to keep up with the demand for product data and high expectations of modern business buyers. This was not only being felt digitally, but also in more traditional sales channels like field sales, telesales, and print marketing. So, in an effort to speed up progress, Turner Price turned to Akeneo PIM.
We knew that spreadsheets and ERP were not the right tools for us to significantly improve the quality of our product data management. This initiative could not have been successful without Akeneo PIM.
Once Turner Price settled on Akeneo PIM, the pair got to work on using the solution to cure what ailed the company’s product enrichment processes and digital experience.
First, they set their sights on solving the inefficiencies that riddled Turner Price’s product creation and enrichment processes. Using Akeneo PIM capabilities like bulk actions, simplified product forms, automation, a validation workflow, and the Teamwork Assistant, the company was able to radically reduce its enrichment time, turning a process that Julian Owen, director at Turner Price called “slow and tortuous” into an instantaneous process. This increased efficiency allowed the company to not only slash time-to-market, but also reduce enrichment costs.
Finally, with these new and more efficient processes in place, Turner Price used Akeneo PIM to create a dynamic and engaging online product experience, one that could compete with global businesses. Owen said that with help from Akeneo and its partner Foodservice Online, the company was able to create a best-in-class product experience that has already led to increased shopping cart sizes and digital revenue in just the first few weeks of its lifespan.
Turner Price is now able to offer a world-class product experience to our customers, which has led to larger and more frequent online purchases.
A better business model
When 2020 began, Turner Price was a successful wholesaler built on a good reputation and well-maintained relationships in the restaurant industry. But when COVID-19 closed hospitality businesses and schools around the U.K in March 2020, the company was forced to accelerate its digital transformation. With help from Akeneo PIM, the company has adopted a new business model, allowing them to not just survive, but thrive during these challenging times.
Efficient enrichment
Due largely to slow enrichment processes, Turner Price was unable to keep up with consumer demand and was forced to spend large percentages of its budget just to enrich products. Following implementation, the company could accelerate its enrichment process thanks to increased efficiency from PIM and cut enrichment costs by 80%, Owen noted.
A consumer-ready product experience
With a single source of truth and efficient enrichment processes in place, Turner Price got to work, creating a bestin-class product experience that could attract new customers who were not already familiar with the company and solidify relationships with existing customers. According to Owen, the effort has been a success from the start, with shopping cart sizes and digital revenue on the rise.
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