The Wimbledon tennis tournament begins this week, and following his exhilarating win at the French Open, all eyes are on Spanish tennis legend Rafael Nadal. Ranked #4 worldwide in singles by the Association of Tennis Professionals and with 22 grand slam wins in his back pocket, it’s clear that Nadal knows what it takes to win, and knows that the right equipment goes a long way. Rafael Nadal’s association with Babolat, the oldest racquet sports company in the world, goes back to when he was just nine years old and has only grown stronger over the years. His collection of trophies and accolades rest comfortably on top of his Babolat racquet, and he’s even become instrumental in the development and design of new racquets. He credits much of his success to having the right tools at hand, and understands the value of a solid foundation. Success takes dedication, hard work, and discipline, but equipping yourself with the right tools and the right mindset is how you become a champion. As an Akeneo customer and recipient of the 2022 Unlock Expansion Award, we’ve worked with Babolat to develop the best customer experience possible so that everyone, including Rafael Nadal, gets everything they need to succeed. For more information on Akeneo and Babolat, you can check out our customer case study, and don’t forget to tune into the Wimbledon championship this week!  

Drum roll please – Akeneo has been recognized as a gold medalist and leader in the 2022 Product Information Management Data Quadrant report from SoftwareReviews, a division of research and consulting firm Info-Tech Research Group. SoftwareReviews Data Quadrant Awards recognize outstanding vendors in the technology marketplace as evaluated by their users annually. Each product is compared and contrasted with all other products in the category to create a holistic, unbiased view of the product landscape. In the full report, you’ll find data collected from real end-users, meticulously verified for veracity, exhaustively analyzed, and visualized in easy-to-understand charts and graphs.  Akeneo PIM has received a composite score of 8.4, earning us a gold medal and title of “Industry Leaders” within the PIM landscape based on satisfaction with product features, vendor experience, capabilities, and emotional sentiment. We also earned top marks in:

• Plan to Renew (100%)
• Likeliness to Recommend (88%)
• Satisfaction that Cost is Fair Relative to Value (73%)

Akeneo also received a high Emotional Footprint score of +84, a value that is an aggregate of emotional response ratings in the areas of service, negotiation, product impact, conflict resolution, and strategy/innovation. The Emotional Footprint score creates a powerful indicator of overall user feeling toward the vendor and its product from the software users’ point of view.  You can check out the full press release here, or download the 2022 PIM Data Quadrant report now.

Introduction

For most successful business initiatives, major investment comes down to potential return vs risk. Product Information Management (PIM) solutions and thus Product Experience Management (PXM) are significant, organization changing, ecommerce driving solutions, but they are also costly investments. The solution licensing and the implementation and enablement process often have separate substantial costs. It is easy to question the value of new software and technology solutions, but for leading providers like Akeneo, who is approaching a decade in business, having a multitude of successful clients helps to speak for investment return. Much of the Return on Investment (ROI) evidence can be broken down into these top four improvements driven by PIM:

1. Speed: Faster Time to Market

A common and accurate attraction to PIM solutions is speed. Faster product information creation, faster data updating, and ultimately faster time to market are primary value drivers. Much of this speed, designed to give teams their time back as well as improve overall efficiencies is due to simplified processes and team visibility. The ability to enter and standardize data across departments in your organizations means less wait time to generate accurate information. Working within a PIM solution also means your content and assets are stored in one location; a single source of truth, rather than siloed on various spreadsheets, servers, and desks. Complete product information no longer needs to be shared with marketing as they are already accessing it and contributing to the completion process. Mobile Technologies Inc.’s Chief Technologies Officer, Travis Hooper shared that “Akeneo has been a game changer, making it possible to use data to simplify new product introduction; succinctly publishing products globally.”. The ability to begin or expand your international ecommerce initiatives without time efficiency loss is a gain from PIM investment. Partnering with Sitation in winning the Akeneo Experience Award 2022, Revalize’s Director of Content Services, Jim Starr says that with the help of the platform “We can take something that used to take hours of time and just run a single rule within that specific data set to say what the product description should be.”  He gets right to the heart of it; “We’ve been able to reduce the time spent manually creating product descriptions.” which brings us to the second improvement.

2. Effort: Reduction in Manual Processes

Less investment and greater return is the goal. It signifies impeccable efficiency, often driven by intelligent advancements. This is a major PIM value when it comes to the effort and processes required for data and content creation as well as updates. Not only do solutions like Akeneo help you do many business functions faster, it helps you do them with a reduction in manual processes. Sitation client, Nationwide Marketing Group, through Chief Digital and Technology Officer, Aaron Bundschuh weighs in on Akeneo’s ease of use, directly contributing to lift reduction, saying “We loved where the focus was on the development roadmap. We are really looking at somebody who is investing in core technology and making it operationally easy to use. It is very aligned with where we are going, as far as the role data plays in our future.” That reduction means you can accomplish the same goals with minimal training and in less touches. That decrease is not only in creation but also in how much backend correction is required. Manual processes are error prone as they often rely on humans with different organizational processes to collaborate. “Working with the premier out of the box functionality of Akeneo allows us to reduce the human process in massive updates and decrease the manual product creation lift by 50%. Not only is that a resource saver, it improves our ability to deliver accurate product data and that is our ultimate value to our customers.”- Jim Starr, Revalize.

3. Cost: Decrease in Operational Expenses

If we pause to examine the powerful effects of increasing speed and reducing effort, we begin to see an exciting contribution to return on PIM investment. This graph demonstrates Revalize’s decrease in cost to enrich product content per sku and we begin to see it very soon after their May 2021 Akeneo adoption. We can see the steady and consistent decline in the number of resources the organization needs to provide to maintain equal productivity, or even improved production rates.  

4. Engagement:  Improved Customer Interaction

Akeneo’s Check Your PX Before You Wreck Your CX sheds some light on the value of driving customer engagement through product data. “In our 2021 Global B2C Survey, we talked to 3,500 consumers from France, Germany, the UK, Australia, China, Canada, and the US. We learned that 50% would pay a premium (10% or more) for a better product experience consisting of more accurate product information.” This survey shares similar results to those of independent surveyors as well as studies conducted by other PIM solution providers. Enriching content and product information through PIM is efficient and can be done systematically. Customer engagement isn’t just about your ecommerce listing but also about how PIM solutions can help create catalogs and connect to customer portals for suppliers or distributors.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the long-term ROI from PIM is everywhere. The reduction in expenses, the increase in product information completion, the conversion driver of a compelling product experience, are among the demonstrable process improvements that exemplify value and return. While solution software is a valuable commitment and investment, what that looks like can be quite different for varying organizations based on several factors. For more information on which Akeneo option might be right for you, check out A CIO’s Guide to Akeneo and reach out to Sitation for guidance through your leap into PIM solutions.  

The title of this article is not a misprint, nor is it hyperbole or exaggeration. We all know we live in a different world than we did just 18 months ago. The Covid-19 pandemic has upended many previous trends and predictions for the modern-day world of both B2C and B2B eCommerce. The demise of print and other offline touchpoints has been greatly exaggerated. One of the definitive effects of Covid was that retail traffic obviously plummeted while e-commerce dramatically increased- forcing companies to re-evaluate their marketing strategies in the wake of this traffic shift.  In today’s world, the definition of “print” has expanded well beyond the traditional paper catalog or product brochure – though those publications remain more important and relevant than many folks give them credit for. These types of publications remain an ideal platform for new product discovery and introduction. However, in most instances, the processes used to create these are archaic at best. We are constantly amazed by some of the things we hear from organizations across the spectrum regardless of industry or company size. Unbelievably, there are even some companies that spend 12-18 months working on a single publication. Most of the layouts we see today are done manually with copy/paste techniques and excel exports. By the time a publication is ready to go to print, much of the information is already out-of-date, further lengthening the publication process as more revisions are made. Even purely “digital” publications often follow these patterns. For instance, the prototypical PDF datasheets that are downloadable from many websites and webshops often follow a similar process. Whenever a new product is released or updates are made, someone has to get a data export from IT, manually open up Adobe InDesign, make the change, send for proofreading and approval, generate the PDF, and finally publish it to the website. These are just a few of the scenarios that we encounter frequently. Outdated processes such as this just exacerbate the stereotype of print’s important role in the omnichannel experience.  Print and other offline touchpoints have been largely ignored thus far in the digital transformation of most marketing departments. A primary reason for this is that the types of capabilities that are taken for granted in the digital world have simply not yet been made accessible to the creative publisher. The ideas of segmentation, personalization, A/B testing, AI, etc., have remained out of the reach for much of the publishing world up to this point. However, a new generation of tools offering layout automation, headless publishing, personalization, and more is now readily available. Rather than furthering the false narrative that offline is dead or dying, these tools enable the marketer to deliver a true omnichannel experience. Additionally, they have the ability to produce very robust ROI from investments in systems like a PIM. Imagine producing a catalog up to 80% more efficiently in terms of time and cost. For example: What if you were able to produce ten 200-page variations of a catalog for various segments versus one 1,000-page monolithic catalog for all? In this case, the substantial increase in ROI comes from both a better-targeted publication and also having saved 800 pages in printing costs. As an added benefit, the creative production time gap between online and offline narrows significantly. Suddenly these publications go from being a legacy necessity to a strategic capability. Creative marketers and agency partners transition from being copy and paste editors to true strategic marketers. Marketing automation platforms are now able to easily incorporate these capabilities into your organization’s campaign planning. The foundation for all the automation and capability is your corporate data that is often contained in a PIM system. Simply put, clean and consistent data is essential for this level of automation. There are several areas where these new capabilities can be employed to directly improve your e-commerce performance. It’s now possible to instantly generate accurate and up-to-date downloadable datasheets simply by making a change to the product data in the PIM without the creative team having to lift a finger. Organizations can enable users to create their own on-demand personalized catalogs, brochures, and more. To cite a particularly innovative use case, a large electronics retailer is now using cart abandonment data to generate personalized postcard offers instead of a standard follow-up email approach. The difference in open rates is staggering. Depending on your source, the email open rate averages around 18-20% and that number is not climbing. Again, depending on your source, the “open” rate on these kinds of offline mailer offers tends to average around 75-80%. Anecdotally, our customer says they have seen a significant increase in conversion and that, additionally, this automated process has not added any burden to their company’s creative marketing resources.  Taking advantage of the well-managed data that exists in the PIM, closing the creative production time gap and enabling the flexibility to produce the same quality of segmentation and personalization offered by offline channels is the key to delivering the complete customer experience management and optimizing the effectiveness of your company’s e-commerce channel. Organizations that capitalize on true omnichannel experiences are the ones that will ultimately succeed in differentiating themselves from their competitors. 

American national security expert and former government official Richard Clarke famously once said “If you spend more on coffee than on IT security, you will be hacked.” We Akeneos do love our coffee, and Ziggy knows a good cup when she sees one. But our commitment to the continuous improvement of how we handle the security of our customers’ and partners’ data is infinitely more important than a strong café noir. And it is that commitment to security implementation and risk mitigation that has been validated with Akeneo achieving ISO 27001 certification status. This is a milestone that we are proud to reach and share with our community. You may be wondering what ISO 27001 is exactly, and you wouldn’t be alone. In short, ISO 27001 is a management system covering processes, people, and tools to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the information organizations manage in a systematic way. It not only provides the know-how, but a company can also get certified against ISO 27001 and so demonstrate to its customers, partners, and employees that it safeguards their data. As an international security standard, it is well-recognized around the world across all industries and organization sizes.

The scope of the information security management system that Akeneo is certified for covers the activities and processes that we use to build, deliver and maintain the products that deal with client and partner data, including Akeneo PIM, Onboarder, Shared Catalogs, Connectors, and Apps. It also covers the different editions and ways we deploy our software, and all the Akeneo teams involved across all our office locations. So why does this matter to you as a member of our Akeneo community? It’s a simple answer with huge implications: you can trust and rely upon a robust solution for PIM and PXM from a provider that takes the people, processes, and technologies to protect your data very seriously. One who is willing to make the investment and be audited by independent third parties to be certified in its approach to the security of your data. So the next time you order that double-shot soy milk no foam spiced pumpkin latte in celebration of achieving your growth goals, you can do so confidently knowing that Akeneo is taking care of your data and the platform that helps drive your success.

For the Experience Award, we invite our customers and partners to submit their entries who believe that their product experience is exceptional, delivering product content that is appropriate for the right context in the right channel and in the right geography. The winners in this category are on the cutting edge in how they represent their brand and products to their customers while driving business results and lowering internal costs and inefficiencies. This year the Akeneo Unlock judges had a very tough time trying to select a winner from all the great finalists: Jaguar Land Rover,Revalize, State of Art, JPW Industries, AllforGolf. And so they decided to pick TWO winners for the Experience Award this year. Let’s see who they are… Our first PXM Champions Awards Winner for this category is Florida-based Revalize in conjunction with our Solution Partner Sitation. Revalize is something of a unique customer amongst Akeneo’s portfolio: part of their offering in the manufacturing CPQ space is that they sell data – rather than physical products – to their customers in the foodservice equipment and supplies industry. That data covers millions of products across many vendors. So they needed a product information management solution that was scalable and flexible enough for their needs, without them having to leverage their in-house engineering team to develop and maintain it. Revalize customers expect a fast turnaround without errors for large-scale updates. So they also needed a solution for product information management that eliminated slow manual processes. Enter Akeneo PIM. Revalize has been leveraging a number of capabilities within Akeneo PIM Enterprise Edition to help them meet their goals:

• Rules are leveraged to reduce the time spent manually updating descriptions across an entire set of products, along with Bulk Edits to make changes to products across vendors.
• Reference Entities help them quickly create, update and leverage common data elements such as vendors and certifications across multiple products.
• Import and Export capabilities are some of the most used and at a massive scale, as one might expect for having to manage and update such a large number of products

Revalize started to see positive results as soon as they implemented Akeneo PIM: the cost to enrich an individual SKU has seen a steady and continuous decline, and the number of product updates their team can complete in a given time period (or what Revalize call their Productivity Efficiency Quality) has been consistently higher than their previous data management implementation. All this while the number of products they have to manage has increased. This dedication to consistently delivering value to their customers with up-to-date and accurate product data and assets that prevent errors with foodservice equipment is why we are proud to recognize Revalize as a PXM Champion with the Experience Award for 2022. Congratulations to the Revalize and Sitation teams!

The second recipient of this year’s Experience Award is JPW Industries based in Tennessee, USA. If you haven’t heard of JPW before, you may well have come across one of their brands of market-leading of machinery and specialty shop tools such as JET, Baileigh, Wilton, Powermatic, Promac, and Edwards. JPW Industries not only designs and manufactures these superior products but is also a value-added distributor in addition to selling across multiple channels including e-commerce, distributors, field sales, and paid media marketing channels. Like many of you who are reading this, product information at JPW Industries before Akeneo was plagued by incompleteness and inaccuracies. Their old legacy PIM software made it nearly impossible to track where data issues were, and modeling was woefully inefficient. Getting data in and out of the legacy PIM required archaic shell scripts just to run. And on top of all that, the software was prone to crashes on a nearly daily basis. This was certainly not a solution for a company that was embarking on an aggressive buy and build strategy to grow its business. Digital transformation was a requirement to support that growth and enable seamless integration of all these new brands. Their solution? Akeneo PIM Enterprise Edition, with thanks to our Solution Partner Bounteous, who also integrated Akeneo PIM with their SAP ERP for core products SKUs, Bynder DAM for their assets, and Productsup for unowned channel syndication. JPW Industries selected Akeneo PIM for its best-in-class usability, powerful data governance, and product modeling capabilities. They appreciated how Akeneo PIM stood out for its intuitive user interface that was geared towards non-technical business users and product information practitioners alike. That short learning curve allowed their product management teams to get up to speed quickly and efficiently. JPW Industries have been able to leverage many of the features of Akeneo PIM Enterprise Edition. One capability the team has really appreciated is Data Quality Insights. It has given them greater visibility and accountability into product information that they never had before, making inaccurate and incomplete product information a thing of the past. So what has this meant for JPW Industries?

• They have seen data quality scores go up from a very low rating to A/B across most product categories. This is reflected in excellent product experiences for their customers and partners across their sales and marketing channels.
• As a result, JPW is seeing record sales growth and capturing greater market share, despite a challenging supply chain environment.
• Enrichment is happening more efficiently, including bringing on a new brand into Akeneo PIM in just a matter of weeks – on time and under budget! This has removed a significant obstacle to bringing on new brands in the future.

This commitment to excellence in product experiences across multiple channels for all their brands while transforming to exceed their business growth goals is the primary reason we are thrilled to also present JPW Industries and Bounteous an Akeneo Unlock PXM Champion Experience Award for 2022. Congratulations to all these great companies – both winners and finalists!

The Leadership Award category aims at rewarding organisations that have been able to grow with their teams. That includes organizations where teammates are happy to use Akeneo in their daily business and don’t regret old methods. If it brings them maturity and opportunities to be less operational and more strategic, if new positions have been created, helping working on more value added content, offering new services and experiences to their customers, and realizing measurable results through the use of Akeneo PXM Studio. This year, for this category, we received great submissions and had 3 Akeneo customers short-listed as finalists: 

• Azelis (BE), along with their partner Smile
• Bergfreunde (DE), along with their partner Flagbit
• MTI – Mobile Technologies (US), along with their partner Sitation

Congratulations to all the finalists! But only one can win…  A winning formulation for Azelis! The 20 years olg group elaborates and markets specialty chemicals in the animal nutrition, food & health, personal and home cares, pharma market segments. They have acquired 7 renowned local and regional brands in the Americas, which provides them a unique go-to market strategy. All of their brands are the best in class distributors in their respective market and offer the highest quality products and technologies supported with application labs and technical service.  Much more than moving goods, they are moving markets forward. Breaking new ground in their technical laboratories by combining ingredients with ideas and creating opportunities through innovation.

With a product catalogue of over 100,000 base products and unique marketing, regulatory and operational requirements needed to serve 58 countries in various market segments, Azelis was missing the ability to master product data on a global scale while still providing unique product enrichment from a marketing and regulatory/operational perspective. Compounding this issue is the speed of growth Azelis has experienced due to new distribution mandates and a strong track record of mergers and acquisitions. A centralized platform to master product data connected to disparate downstream systems and supported by one aligned governance structure was critical to expedite time to market for new products and to integrate acquisitions. Azelis decided to choose Akeneo PXM Studio to support their digital transformation program, with one key goal: to facilitate enrichment of product information by market segment and connect to their online customer experiences platforms on a global scale and maintain their unique sense of innovation. Becoming a true PXM champion The largest challenge that Azelis had to overcome was the time taken to create a product which impacted on their time-to-market and responsiveness to customers. To overcome this the following solutions were found and integrated to the PaaS version of Akeneo PIM Enterprise Edition:

• Creation of business request forms using SharePoint that use workflow to allow validation at the source (e.g. duplicate check) and integration of product reference data. Information from business is automatically transferred into Akeneo.
• Creation of an A.I. based Automatic Data Extraction tool that is embedded into Akeneo. The AI tooling automatically extracts information from non-standard pdf documents attached to the business request form.
• Automatic upload into SharePoint of documents and link to products and to the customer experience platforms
• Near real-time integration

This resulted in internal improvements:  In the first 3 months, Azelis experienced 50% efficiency gains in processing product creation. By increasing quantity and quality simultaneously this has resulted in 50% less errors thanks to automation, validation rules and workflows. Azelis has been able to increase its enriched master data by 46% to include information for over 190 attributes including marketing, operations and SHEQ (regulatory and safety) data. They also have marketing information and support input for locale specific values required for regulatory compliance and language translations. This has definitely reduced the complexity of master data fields within ERP that moved to PIM with the advantage of less maintenance and one single source of truth only. They have reduced the requirement for ERP licences as well as reduced ERP development & maintenance costs resulting in 0,2M€ savings. 200+ users based in 58 countries and 45 languages now work regularly in Akeneo and speak the same language. Multiple teams can now work simultaneously on the same products.

But this also resulted in external improvements which make you a PXM Champion: The implementation of the Akeneo PIM Enterprise Edition truly improved connectivity with Azelis’ suppliers and warehouses and has meant faster onboarding of their Merger & Acquisitions projects and new distribution mandates. And last but not least, from a carbon footprint point of view, Azelis has been able to rationalise their pack-sizes by 37%. Discover other inspiring customer success stories reading the Expansion Award post, the Accelerator, the Global or the Expansion one.

The Accelerator Award category aims at rewarding organisations that have been able to reach their goals faster than ever. That includes those organizations that have significantly reduced the time-to-market of their products, minimizing the number of steps involved, eliminating manual work, helping expand their product offering and / or launch new range of products thanks to their use of Akeneo PIM and/or Akeneo Onboarder, and realizing measurable results through the use of Akeneo PXM Studio. This year, for this category, we received great submissions and had 3 Akeneo customers short-listed as finalists: 

• Butlers GmbH & Co. KG (DE), along with their partner Brandung
• Boohoo (UK)
• APEM (FR), along with their partner Synolia

Congratulations to all the finalists! But only one can win…  This Accelerator Award needed Butlers*! *In reference to the recent 1st successful TV ad, Butlers launched for Spring with Home 24 in Germany “Dein Draußen braucht dich” (meaning “Your outdoor needs you”). Butlers was acquired by Home 24 in December 2021 and the 2 companies perfectly complement each other, bringing to life a powerful omnichannel retailer for home & living products. 

Together, the 2 brands have a complete omnichannel business that includes different countries, online and offline sales channels, franchise and B2B concepts, print and digital catalogues, and diverse product categories.  “The Butlers stores, in attractive city locations, multiply our personal contact opportunities with customers and increase our independence from online marketing. At the same time, we strengthen our respective online offerings.” Marc Appelhoff, CEO of Home24 Prior to leveraging Akeneo PXM Studio, the brand had integrated their self-developed PIM tool. However, the system had been too slow for years because many things had to be worked out manually. For example, It often happened that more than five people entered the same kind of information in more than 8 places. This led to a very expensive and difficult process. In addition, this also led to many errors, poor data quality and lack of reliability.  This was obviously not scalable when you have ambitious growth plans.  Aware of that, and based on their fast growing expansion, Dr. Lasse Meißner, Head of BUTLERS-Digital and his team, were looking for a more flexible solution. They challenged over 20 different competitive solutions and finally found Akeneo to be the most suitable for their very complex omnichannel business. 

6 weeks to refine processes and address the eCommerce website Their biggest challenge was the scheduled project time of only six weeks. They kept drawing on the expertise of Akeneo in-house specialists and their partner Brandung to learn and make good decisions at an incredibly fast pace. They were able to use a lot of best practice examples from other projects for their own project to achieve the best result. And it worked! They succeeded in implementing the SaaS version of Akeneo PIM Enterprise Edition in less than six weeks! This involved four countries, five sales channels, 15 079 products, 351 attributes and just under one million data points. This new reliable foundation initially enabled them to also relaunch their eCommerce system within another eight weeks after the implementation. In addition, they were able to connect functions across departments and now are pursuing the same goals together. The impact of all that speaks for itself: they more than doubled conversion rate online since they went live.  Duplicate data maintenance is reduced to one-fifth of what it used to be. The new work process has been aligned with Akeneo’s capabilities and is a perfect fit today. Also, they have drastically reduced their error rate. With simpler and more transparent maintenance, fewer errors occur and, if they do, are corrected more quickly. This definitely impacts the product and customer experience and reduces return rates.  In conclusion, the creation and maintenance of product data has been simplified to such an extent that the team can maintain three times more data than before with the same resources and thus offer at least three times better service to their customers. Such a concrete acceleration, Butlers definitely deserves this PXM Award and could have applied in the Leadership category too!

The first category, the Expansion Award, aims at rewarding organisations that are changing their business by focusing on creating better experiences in both current channels and introducing new ones, addressing new audiences and challenges, and resulting in measurable results through the use of Akeneo PXM Studio. This year, for this category, we received great submissions, and had 3 short-listed Akeneo customers were: 

• Kitwave Group (UK), along with their partner iWeb
• Babolat (FR)
• Nationwide Marketing Group (US), along with their partner Sitation

But only 1 can win… Game. Set. Match. For Babolat this year! Yes, it was an easy one 😉 But for the last 2 years, Babolat’s teams have invested time and energy in creating a strong foundation to grow globally. 

After more than a century of selling tennis racquets and equipment in a B2B model, Babolat more recently embarked on an ambitious project to grow via a D2C approach.  Their products are used by professional and recreational players worldwide. Today, the company employs 370 employees and maintains a global presence. Babolat distributes its products through a network of distributors via a B2B website, a brand showcase website, and a print catalogue.  Babolat needed to adapt its sales strategy to meet the expectations of players and retailers around the world while offering them quality product information. Setting up a complementary model of direct sales to the consumer quickly became a necessary step for the group. With this in mind, the work on product data enrichment had to be streamlined to satisfy both a B2B audience of distributors, retailers, coaches, and clubs, as well as their new direct-to-customer audience of tennis players.

Guillaume Sérodon, Digital Project Manager, joined Babolat 3 years ago at the beginning of their digital transformation.  The goal was to deploy in 9 months a brand new website showcasing their products and expertise with e-commerce functionality in the main countries the brand operates in. He had the responsibility of implementing the PIM and DAM as MVPs (Minimum Viable Products) to answer the most urgent needs of aggregating, controlling and delivering the product information and assets on the babolat.com brand platform. Prior to choosing Akeneo for Product Information Management and Cloudinary for Digital Asset Managements, the teams had no tool allowing them to have product data governance, and no control over how accurate data should be shared with them. 14 Excel masterfiles were used by the internal teams to manage the product information in Sharepoint shared folders. This resulted in: 

• Big and slow files to work on
• Lot of manual work and manipulation errors
• Duplicates – it was complicated if not impossible to know where the most recent and accurate information was
• Completeness and accuracy issues
• Tiresome translations – content was created only in English and French and doubled the number of files to maintain

“The good thing is that our external partners had access to the information, the bad thing is we had very little control over it” says Guillaume. With the goal of launching a worldwide website in 8 languages and a whole new marketing narrative targeted towards the end-consumer rather than the B2B clients, the need to implement an adaptable tool came naturally. A new way of working Perfectly aware of the change management such a project involves, Guillaume and his team organised 2 days of workshops gathering 1/5th of the company, regrouping all the services even remotely linked to product information, to design the data architecture.  “We were all gathered in a huge room, we had the list of all the identified product attributes on the wall, and the groups went through each of them debating on the use of the attribute, the responsibility for the data, the ones consuming it, the rules which should be applied to them, the timing of completion, and all the relevant data governance you should clarify prior to launching such a project.” explains Guillaume. They succeeded in dividing by 3 the number of product attributes, and defined the responsibilities and completion deadlines of each involved team. Knowing the hardest challenge would be the implementation of a strong data governance in the enrichment processes, Babolat selected the SaaS version of Akeneo PIM Enterprise Edition as a flexible and continuously-improving solution. The goal was for it to centralise and distribute information to all channels and applications consuming marketing product data. Time being of essence, they decided to implement the PIM in their growing technology landscape as a MVP which could be integrated with a DAM and their eCommerce solution, Salesforce Commerce Cloud.  It took 6 months from the discovery of Akeneo until its connection to their e-commerce platform to design the ideal product experience for their customers (both B2B audience and D2C) and set-up the smoothest internal workflows to craft it.  We can definitely say that they champion the Expansion category!