As an electrical supplies distributor with more than 2.5 million products, Rexel understands the impact that high quality, reliable product information can have on the customer experience.
Unfortunately, not all of our suppliers can do ETIM. It is an international model that is not cost-free and requires significant implementation by suppliers. Following this observation, we sought to categorize our products, in the reference model [ETIM], instead of our suppliers. This action is very time consuming and requires a lot of resources and product knowledge. Based on this new observation, we looked for solution from algorithmic solutions.
Leader in the professional distribution of electrical supplies, Rexel has become a major player in its sector with its 2.5 million active products and its participation in the birth of FAB-DIS jointly created with the FGME (Federation of Electrical Supplies Wholesalers). Since adopting FAB-DIS, Rexel has been using all the data collected in its webshop, encouraging manufacturers to enrich the data they share. To be successful in a digital world, you have to be able to classify your product data. At Rexel, we have a historical nomenclature and an international nomenclature, called ETIM. Since the implementation of FAB-DIS, the ETIM classification is requested to our suppliers. This classification is essential for the user experience, if it is missing it is complicated to find a product on our webshop [the product will not be classified in the right category and therefore not found].
Unfortunately, not all of our suppliers can do ETIM. It is an international model that is not cost-free and requires significant implementation by suppliers. Following this observation, we sought to categorize our products, in the reference model [ETIM], instead of our suppliers. This action is very time consuming and requires a lot of resources and product knowledge. Based on this new observation, we looked for solution from algorithmic solutions.
The relationship built with Unifai is tied to our desire to have data quality. Out of over 2 million products, we have about 800,000 products that need to be completed on classification aspects.
Leader in the professional distribution of electrical supplies, Rexel has become a major player in its sector with its 2.5 million active products and its participation in the birth of FAB-DIS jointly created with the FGME (Federation of Electrical Supplies Wholesalers). Since adopting FAB-DIS, Rexel has been using all the data collected in its webshop, encouraging manufacturers to enrich the data they share. To be successful in a digital world, you have to be able to classify your product data. At Rexel, we have a historical nomenclature and an international nomenclature, called ETIM. Since the implementation of FAB-DIS, the ETIM classification is requested to our suppliers. This classification is essential for the user experience, if it is missing it is complicated to find a product on our webshop [the product will not be classified in the right category and therefore not found].
Unfortunately, not all of our suppliers can do ETIM. It is an international model that is not cost-free and requires significant implementation by suppliers. Following this observation, we sought to categorize our products, in the reference model [ETIM], instead of our suppliers. This action is very time consuming and requires a lot of resources and product knowledge. Based on this new observation, we looked for solution from algorithmic solutions.
The ambition for Rexel is for Unifai to become an everyday tool for the product data team and manual work is reserved only for the very special cases where we need an expert to validate the AI proposition.
This year and especially with Unifai, we went from a 1% annual increase to 10% in categorizing our products into ETIM classes. Of our 800,000 products without an ETIM class, AI found 10% more ETIM classes than the previous year. The objective with Unifai is to have 100% of our business with ETIM classes. It is reassuring for the moment because we challenged Unifai on product data that our internal algorithm could not do and today Unifai knows how to propose classes. The goal with a tool like Unifai is that everything that is complicated is handled by the algorithm.
We tested Unifai with already corrected values to measure the gap between the in-house developed algorithm and Unifai’s. We got 98% alignment between the two algorithms and on the remaining 2%, even the human eye has trouble finding a solution.
With Akeneo PIM and AI technology powered by Unifai (now Supplier Data Manager) Rexel was able to:
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