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 By the time a publication is ready to go to print, much of the information is already out-of-date, further lengthening the publication process as more revisions are made.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 Outdated processes such as this just exacerbate the stereotype of print’s important role in the omnichannel experience.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!

The Global Award category aims at rewarding organisations that are expanding their business outside their HQ country to succeed in new territories, collaborating with local teams, addressing new audiences and challenges, and realizing measurable results through the use of Akeneo PXM Studio.

This year, for this category, we received great submissions and had 4 short-listed Akeneo customers: 

• Jaguar Land Rover (UK), along with their partner iWeb
• Pilot Pen (FR)
• Liqui Moly (DE), along with their partner Flagbit
• Xandres (BE), along with their partner Induxx

Congratulations to all the finalists! But only one can win… 

On the road with Jaguar Land Rover this year! Together, with their talented & passionate people in the UK and across the globe,they have all the ingredients at their disposal to reimagine the business and the experiences their customers seek. They will define what modern luxury means in the world of tomorrow, driven by sustainability.

The two British brands have always been at the avant-garde of technology and design in luxury vehicles and products, and they intended to reduce time to market for new verticals, new catalogs, new websites and geographical markets (locales and territories) supporting a worldwide footprint. They indeed operate in 195 countries, 28 languages, have 32 localized websites, and 2 international warehouses. They’re employing over 39,000 people worldwide.

 

Prior to leveraging Akeneo PXM Studio, the brands suffered from technical debt of internal systems and had no centralised catalogue across internal Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) product departments i.e. Classic Parts, Lifestyle Products, Accessories, and Connected Car. Internal JLR product departments acted as silos. As a consequence, they had a slow time to market and it was complicated to scale as fast as they wished and to offer a better product experience. 

When you are a global leader, adaptation to markets is a must-have. And it starts with a great translation that is meaningful for local consumers. At that time, translations couldn’t be done in parallel, and only a single market could be translated at a time. 

Working with business partners was also becoming more and more difficult as the brand had no common way (or format) to export product data to pass to 3rd party systems. 

On the road to a new way of working

To unlock and enhance new geographic markets, time to market for new verticals, new catalogs, and feed 32 different localized Adobe Commerce websites, Jaguar Land Rover had to adopt a more unified approach to eCommerce within the organization. 

After migrating more than 1M SKUs into a new single source of truth, Akeneo PIM Enterprise Edition has also been integral in designing a new way of working for the different teams involved in the product enrichment life cycle:

New merchandising and buying team members have been onboarded, making it smoother thanks to the user-friendly interface, the dedicated team views, and the permissions for each local team. 

Then the internal product development enrichment teams, the marketing teams, the e-commerce merchandising and sales teams have been trained and have quickly learned.

They can now better manage product variants within a large range of models, and they appreciate the flexibility of it too. 

The digital asset and print teams benefit from the Asset Manager to create and manage a single source of truth for all product experiences globally. 

All departments now have unified access to all their data across all their internal projects for the future.

And the investments are rewarding. As of today, Jaguar had a 174% increase in Holiday sales for an overall 93% increase in conversion rate in 2021. 

Land Rover had a significant 218% increase in Holiday sales and increased its conversion rate to 86%, for an overall 235% increase in transactions in 2021.

We can definitely say that they champion the Global category!

1. A retrowave look at the future During his opening Keynote, Akeneo CEO Fred de Gombert suggested taking a step back and embracing our past to look at our future.  And when looking at the last 2 years, Fred thanked the whole Akeneo community for having stayed by our side despite all the big changes that have happened.

And actually 2021 was a pretty great year for Akeneo: 

• We’ve been recognized as leader by major industry analysts (Forrester, IDC, Ventana)
• We’ve welcomed 200+ new customers that we are thrilled to help unlock growth thanks to Product Experiences
• We’ve grown the team and now have 300+ employees in 9 different countries to be closer to our community
• Akeneo customers have created 100+ products per minute all over the world

  So why reboot? This offers such a great way to start again from scratch with fresh eyes. This works for many industries. And this is obviously true for PIM software.  If the main goal 10 years ago was to create one main source of truth for product information, Akeneo succeeded in rebooting back then, bringing a new and easy user experience while answering to demanding quality expectations.  As the world has changed a lot during the last 10 years, Fred shared how it’s time to reboot PIM software again, to redefine it, embracing these changes: 

• Routes-to-market are evolving everyday, and brands and manufacturers now address many more channels than ever before which implies new challenges;
• From a consumer point of view, Product Information does not only concern “cold data”, but pricing, availability, and reviews are also part of the Product Experience; 
• Architectures have changed: this is why Akeneo joined the MACH Alliance to be a key component of composable commerce.

To help Akeneo grow and reboot the PIM category, we needed some fuel, and Fred announced that Akeneo has raised $135 Million for our Series D funding round. And to reconnect with his 80’s self, Fred not only chose to wear the same exact green knitwear he wore when he was 10, but also to invite the creator of the video games he used to play as a kid. Discovering adventure games was a real life changer for Fred, especially Broken Sword, one of the all-time classic adventures, by multi BAFTA-nominated Charles Cecil. Charles Cecil shared his journey across 40 years, from writing his first computer games to being CEO of Revolution Software. This is an industry where extraordinary change has happened over that time through market disruption and technical changes. Charles and his team had to pivot and reboot several times, embracing those changes to adapt and grow. All along this journey, his community of loyal and passionate fans have always been a truly valued support to Charles and his team. It was fascinating to understand that they could have made much more money doing what the major players were doing (shooting people in video games just to give an example), but what matters at the end is to remain close to your values and your community expectations, to grow longer, together. 2. Some insights into Akeneo PXM Studio Omnichannel is here to stay, reminded us Kristin Naragon, our VP Marketing and Strategy who took to the stage alongside Antoine Barbier, VP Product. They highlighted recent capabilities of Akeneo PXM Studio that support the demanding needs of omnichannel leaders: to be able to easily share high-quality product information with anyone inside or outside your company.  So what do Shared Catalogs and Tailored Exports specifically offer to support your omnichannel challenges? 

• Tailored Exports are ideal for omnichannel data export where no API exists on the receiving side yet meet the receivers requirements for flat data files.

If you work with a new important retail partner, they expect the perfect required product information. You can easily  map your product information with the ones expected by your distributor, including their labels, for the locales they sell in, without having to change your internal Akeneo PIM product catalog structure. And keep this dedicated export in your library to share any updates frequently, ensuring the accuracy of the information given. 

• Shared Catalogs allows internal and external stakeholders to easily access the information they need to better inform and serve their customers and business partners through a dedicated self-service portal. It has been doing very well and continues to receive many updates since it was first launched in 2021.

And as Omnichannel success also means having several tools in the tech stack to provide the perfect customer experience, you need to connect your ecosystem in a cloud-native world. Akeneo App Store was born to make it easier for you to connect Akeneo PIM to other players, and thus augment product information management capabilities. All new Apps in addition to existing connectors are now available right from within Akeneo PIM itself  For our partners, it also makes their life easier to get on the market faster. Services, documentation and sample codes are available.  7 apps are already live thanks to the involvement of our Technology Partners: BigCommerce, Channel Engine, ProductUp, Tradebyte, InBetween, Priint and Unifai.  For Tailored Exports and Akeneo App Store, we were lucky enough to have a live demo by Sr. Director for Product Marketing Ali Hanyaloglu. 3. Demystifying composable commerce One of the tech buzzwords for the 2021-2022 season is definitely composable commerce. More than a tech trend, it is really a way for companies to think about the tools they offer to their internal users to best feed their needs and provide the best customer experience at the end of the day in agile and flexible way. And talking about seasons, one of the 3 guests Fred invited, Hubert Odend’hal, Sales Director at CommerceTools, smartly compared composable commerce to fashion behaviours: people indeed love mixing style and brands to reflect their own personality.  Iris Schiefer, Sr. Strategic Partnerships Manager at BigCommerce, loves using the term BYOE (for Build You Own Experience) to describe composable commerce. It’s all about creating that vision of the business outcomes and the digital experience you want to deliver to the consumer, and then working backwards to find that best of breed tech stack.  With his strong background in eCommerce agencies, John Williams, Amplience CTO also explained how having a headless approach brings less complexity and is also less expensive for much more value.  Instead of the cost, organizations should keep their focus on the value delivered. The 4 actors on stage are proud members of the MACH Alliance which presents and advocates for an open and best-of-breed enterprise technology ecosystem. 4. 8 insightful and inspiring customer testimonials This year’s Unlock shines the limelight on 8 great customers sharing their PXM stories from different industries, different ages, different sizes, but with one common point: the will to offer a new way of working,  whether it comes to creating product information and content, or to sharing better quality of product information, more frequently with external business partners.  Here are some key takeaways from each customer speakers that we were thrilled to welcome on stage: 

• In the first mainstage session, Prune PILLOIS, omnichannel Director at LVMH Group and Yolanda Diaz, Product Data Owner for the Perfumes & Cosmetics Division explained how LVMH Group pools and coordinates all functions that can be shared among its Houses, freeing up precious time to focus on the essentials: crafting an inspiring story to offer the best product experience. The perfect balance between agility and responsibility.

• We had the pleasure to receive Pasqual Ortuño Nuñez, Rémy Cointreau Group IT Digital Manager, who explained to (and entertained) us how the legendary group and its international portfolio of spirits, including Rémy Martin, Louis XIII cognac, and of course Cointreau liquor, unites the very best of long-standing traditions with the most modern practices in customer experience to build a powerful brand identity.
• Then, thanks to 2 breakout sessions, Babolat shared with the audience how, after more than a century of selling tennis racquets and equipment in a B2B model, the brand more recently embarked on an ambitious project to grow via a D2C approach. Through the expansion of its existing model, they integrated new functionality and embraced exceptional product experiences thanks to Cloudinary DAM and Akeneo PIM Enterprise Edition.
• And Swiss Krono, the world’s leading manufacturer of wood-based materials, shared their story of expanding possibilities for growth by embracing brand consistency and innovation across different omnichannel digital experiences with their customers, with Digital Publishing being key and supported by InBetween. 
• On Day 2, Royal Canin’s PXM Product Owner Sylvain Cavaillé explained how, with the growth of digital channels and new business models, they had been scaling their strategy (and tools) to support an omnichael channel approach at the service of pets and pet owners. They have secured a leading position by sharing, teaching and engaging with a community of passionate people.
• We also had a very inspiring testimonial from Belco Coffee, to understand how, in a high-growth market such as the one Belco market and sell their sustainable coffees to, one should never compromise on the traceability and quality of the experience customers have with you just to meet ever-changing needs. Leslie Labord, head of Marketing and Vincent Fortin, head of IT, detailed how they want to engage their business partners and customers with high quality coffee and high quality product information.
• The audience was also lucky to learn from Will Clayton, Lead Product Manager at Boohoo, how the group has enabled continued dynamic growth by implementing a robust, flexible and scalable single source of truth for product data, allowing its use to enhance customer experience, decision-making and process effectiveness, for their 13 market leading brands.
• The last testimonial we were happy to listen to was from Stanislas Magnin, Director of Astore Marketplace at Accor group. He told us about their new procurement method for every single Accor hotel in the world, and the importance of providing the best product experience, building a core model for product information when you address so many different territories, with different maturity and different decision weight.

  5. 6 hands-on sessions with Akeneo experts All along these 2 days, for the first time, we offered hands-on sessions hosted by in-house experts from the Product team, the Professional Services team and Presales teams. It was a great occasion to (re)position the business value of the latest Akeneo PXM Studio capabilities and go deeper into their implementation. Attendees had to register prior to the sessions, and based on the real success it was, we promise we’ll offer more seats next year! 6. Babolat, Butlers, Jaguar Land Rover, Azelis, Revalize and JPW industries take home the PXM Awards After Unlock attendees had their fill of PXM expertise for one day and the moon had risen, some Akeneo customers and partners got their moment in the sun as the winners of Unlock’s five awards were announced. You’ll be able to discover their PXM stories and the reasons why they were 2022 Unlock PXM Awards winners in coming (very soon) dedicated blogposts. Thanks to all our customers, partners, and sponsors for making the 2022 Akeneo Unlock such a special event. We can’t wait to see you again next year!

We invite you to click the links to watch the full presentation recordings once you have had a small taste of them from this article.

• Know more about CEO Fred de Gombert’s Keynote

• Know more about Special guest Charles Cecil’s story

• Know more about the 2022 Unlock PXM Awards

Each year, we see all sorts of digital solutions predictions, trends, and themes. This year, we are likely to see even more commentary about the power of content in the continually rising sea of blog posts (yes, this is indeed another drop in that sea). Content that drives product visibility, understanding, and sales conversion continue to be an ever-present priority in our pursuit of strategic digital success. Web content relating to products takes many forms. Basic specifications, like dimensions or colors, are essential. Visual communication elements, such as product images and video, provide greater detail. Written features, such as product stories, testimonials, and thought leadership relating to product categories build credibility and search engine visibility. All of this content becomes digital product data.  Digital commerce businesses can always be certain that their success is led by the effectiveness of their data and their users’ interaction with it. The data we put into our commerce ecosystem affects the results we get out of these channels. Are you measuring the success of your data with your customers? If not, start. Measurement will spotlight both areas of strength as well as opportunities for improvement. Those are important factors as you make the case for investing in specific areas to promote growth. Imagine, for a moment, a couple of scenarios that may mirror the way you and your business manage the product content that goes into your commerce ecosystem.

• Scenario One. A business builds out product assets as part of back-office processes. Those assets may be developed by a product team or retail team. From there, the product data is entered into an enterprise resource planner (ERP) to be mixed in with business processes like supply chain, sales, financials, and more. Within a vast ERP system, the end-user experience with specific product data is often lost or unknown.
• Scenario Two. A business builds a spreadsheet of product information to disseminate to various teams. These teams then update and alter product information to suit their purposes, using it in their various channels. In this scenario, version control, accuracy, consistency, and basic data governance become virtually impossible.

These are just two of many management scenarios that our team sees regularly. Upstream from ultimate ecommerce transactions, we consistently identify product data fragmentation that can be crippling to ultimate sales success. These two scenarios highlight the need for consistent data flow, content/data governance, process management, and optimized infrastructure for the dissemination of product information to a storefront (digital or otherwise) where we can measure the performance of our merchandising tactics and build a case for better operations. Akeneo, as a market-leading product information/experience management (PIM/PXM) solution, provides consistent benefits to sophisticated businesses. For Business Operations, Marketing and Sales:

• Raise revenue due to stronger data consistency and (possibly) multi-channel selling
• Reduce returns because users are more informed about the products they’re purchasing
• Reduce product time-to-market to help increase organizational velocity
• Increase productivity and efficiency of product and retail teams, eliminating inefficient practices
• Improve product data quality to enrich your enterprise
• Manage complexity easier with an intuitive interface and robust functionality set
• Adaptable and flexible to support change through business controls that allow users to adjust products on the fly
• Mitigate the hidden costs related to managing customer experience (CX) at a local level everywhere products are referenced

For Information Technology:

• Governed data management to eliminate tribalism and system dependency (see above – productivity)
• Centralized product information to minimize fragmentation and total cost of ownership when considering multiple systems
• Intuitive interface to help business users self-serve
• Deployment options such as SaaS or PaaS reduce capital overhead
• Robust API and events framework for up/downstream connections
• Open-source (based on edition) marketplace
• Getting help is easy with a large partner ecosystem

You can forecast many specific ways that optimizing product management can drive revenue and operational efficiency. For example, using some hypothetical scenarios and round numbers:

• 1 employee manages products
• 25% of their duties are tied to product management
• The enterprise pays this employee $50k
• An employee takes 4 products to market per quarter
• Measurement outcome A: Employee maintains 25% allocation but can get 6 products to market per quarter. This employee’s salary now produces greater product-specific results.
• Measurement outcome B: Employee only requires 15% allocation but can still get 4 products to market per quarter. This employee’s salary now produces the same outcome but offers diversified value to the organization.

Using similar equations as the above, you can very quickly monetize the ways PIM/PXM tooling can help to drive not only a return on investment but also revenue and operational efficiency. Make it your trend in 2022 to work smarter within your commerce ecosystem. Consider all of the ways your business can optimize your product management processes. By driving a better user experience with your products, you can advance the bottom line for your organization.