Product Experience

Creating a Winning Digital Experience: A Q&A with Bounteous’s CTO, Seth Dobbs

Companies today compete and win through their digital experience.

Companies today compete and win through their digital experience. Bounteous focuses its efforts on co-innovation and transformative digital experiences to drive results for its clients. They elevate brand experiences through their technology partnerships and unparalleled platform expertise. Akeneo’s leading Product Information Management (PIM) solution enhances customer experience with accurate and complete product information. Together we help companies deliver compelling product experiences and drive bottom-line results through award-winning Akeneo PIM implementations.

Companies today compete and win through their digital experience. Bounteous focuses its efforts on co-innovation and transformative digital experiences to drive results for its clients. They elevate brand experiences through their technology partnerships and unparalleled platform expertise. Akeneo’s leading Product Information Management (PIM) solution enhances customer experience with accurate and complete product information. Together we help companies deliver compelling product experiences and drive bottom-line results through award-winning Akeneo PIM implementations. Are you looking for an edge in digital experience? Our VP of Global Alliances and Channels, Scott Rogers sat down with Seth Dobbs, Chief Technology Officer at Bounteous to break down important factors your business must consider at the start of a digital transformation project, current trends in digital experience that are critical to future success, and how your business can stay innovative and ahead of the curve in the current digital landscape. Scott: What are the most important factors businesses must consider at the start of a digital transformation project? Seth: First and foremost, we believe in the power of ‘critical insights’ to inform strategies and experiences we create. ​We generate critical insights to develop end-to-end strategies that yield the most valuable opportunities for experience and commerce innovation. Innovation is accelerated by a virtuous cycle we call ‘digital flow,’ in which data yields critical insights that enable multi-moment orchestration and continuous experience and commerce innovation. We believe in always having a measurement strategy in place with the right tracking to ensure we can continue to learn from and evolve the digital experience – making it work harder and smarter for you. ​ Lastly, when we talk about co-innovation and collaboration, we talk a lot about the right enablement model that must be in place in order to help our customers mature across talent, methods, tech, and data – all of which are critical in achieving a continuous cycle of innovation. These pillars are critical to delivering an innovative digital experience. Without the right team, technology, strategy, platform, and data tools, you’ll be fighting an uphill battle.

Scott: What specific trends do you see in the digital experience (DX) space right now that you think will be critical to future success?  Seth: Right now, I’m seeing three main trends emerging.

1. Composable Architecture

Trends in headless technology have offered breakthrough improvements in customer experience but implementing headless as isolated projects limit the total business impact. Composable architecture, on the other hand, provides business agility, speed, and reliability by combining efforts logically at the infrastructure level. Composable architecture is a comprehensive approach to consolidating headless initiatives—ultimately bringing agility to the digital experience infrastructure. Think of composable as the big sister of headless DX architecture. Composable requires more initial planning but brings greater long-term savings through process optimization and flexibility. With composable, you can manage the true value of decoupled systems and create the best-in-class solutions for your business—making composable the future of digital experiences.

2. Customer-Centric Architecture

In the early phase of a relationship between your organization and a platform partner, it’s crucial for your partner to understand the business need and your customer so the platform customization can be architected with those factors in mind. When you lose sight of your customers by letting technology dictate your approach, you start serving the means rather than the end, meaning you’re implementing technology for its own sake, rather than serving a business purpose. As our digital ecosystems become more sophisticated and integrate multiple platforms as well as bespoke components, we expect to see a growing trend around customer-centric architecture.

3. Co-Innovation

When we work together, we succeed together.  Often, departments within an organization talk to each other but have their own unique goals and objectives in mind when building a platform rather than a single set of overarching, unifying goals.  That tends to create data silos and issues surrounding the points of control around data flow. A good partner can serve as communicative and connective tissue between the departments in an organization. They will help your team look beyond individual department goals and see a cohesive picture that can better inform the implementation.  We expect to see more clients demand this kind of mutuality from their partners in the future. Scott: What were three (3) keys to your success in building digital experiences in 2021? Seth:

1. A co-innovation model to partnership – one which meant we worked side by side with our customers day in and out to achieve measurable business results on time and on budget.
2. Embracing a culture of testing and learning to drive ongoing insights and improvement to digital experiences
3. Using research and insights to drive the digital experience, the way in which the brand is represented in the digital space, and ultimately how brands engage with their audiences across channels.

Scott: How do you help businesses stay innovative and ahead of the curve in the current digital landscape? Seth: At Bounteous, we exist to help leading companies compete and win digitally by continuously innovating brand experiences that drive transformative results. We believe that innovation begins with critical insight and that competitive advantage is attained when a brand can continuously generate and apply those insights. Simply stated, innovation is doing better things and doing things better. Therefore, insights need to be generated for various purposes – to help organizations define their thesis for transformation, create distinct brand experiences, expand and identify customer segments, flawlessly execute to drive conversion, and so much more. We achieve this through our model of co-innovation which is not a project or standalone initiative; it is fundamentally about enhancing the way we work together with our clients to deliver results. We believe that companies today compete and win through their digital experience – and how that digital experience connects to all other aspects of their ecosystem.  While that’s been true for a while, we’ve seen it accelerate these last two years as companies need to connect with their customers more and more – and as 1:1 relationships with customers become the norm. Keith Schwartz, Co-Founder & CEO of Bounteous, has introduced the Co-Innovation Manifesto, which includes principles and a call-to-action for business executives seeking to compete and win digitally.  We highly recommend you check it out! About Seth: Seth Dobbs is the CTO at Bounteous. He’s driven to help others succeed, whether it’s team members, peers, partners, or clients. He defines strategies for his clients across a wide range of business domains, architectural styles, and technologies, sets the direction of the Bounteous Technology team, and drives the development of technical and leadership skills throughout the organization. He’s been named Chicago’s Best Technology Manager and he speaks at conferences worldwide on leadership, architecture, and technology strategy. Seth is an O’Reilly OLT author, and wrote several articles in the book “97 Things Every Engineering Manager Should Know.”

Product Experience

Carbon is the New Black: Sharing Your Impact Through Key Product Information

Based on conversations I have had with companies that Akeneo works with, the impact of their products on the world around us has quickly become a top …

Based on conversations I have had with companies that Akeneo works with, the impact of their products on the world around us has quickly become a top priority for 2022. These companies have started to contract with platform providers who can measure this, with the promise of monitoring the entire supply chain and improving the carbon footprint of products.

Based on conversations I have had with companies that Akeneo works with, the impact of their products on the world around us has quickly become a top priority for 2022. These companies have started to contract with platform providers who can measure this, with the promise of monitoring the entire supply chain and improving the carbon footprint of products. However, calculating carbon footprint is becoming a standard process today. Companies that aren’t doing this need to catch up as it allows consumers to make better purchase decisions. Product information plays an important role in this, enabling companies to be clear on their products’ manufacturing and services carbon footprint. That is their climate impact is measured in carbon dioxide (CO₂) equivalent emissions. Reducing the carbon footprint of products not only has an effect on company costs, but also on demand. While greener products tend to be more costly to produce, consumers tend to purchase more at a given price when products have a lower carbon footprint. The levels of brand sensitivity and involvement in this topic have a direct impact on the brand personality. And brand personality does actually influence brand trust, brand attachment, and brand commitment. Thanks to a survey we ran with OpinionWay in 2021, we learned that 52% of consumers would be willing to pay more when brand values are part of the product information shared. Certificates & quality labels should come first!

So where to start your green journey? And what will matter for consumers? Their needs and concerns will be different, based on the respective business areas, consumer segments, and market. While some companies are targeting green consumers in developed markets (who tend to be more mature on the topic), others may be focused on the rapidly growing middle class in emerging markets, which means that the following recommendations will be highly relevant to many but not all businesses. Therefore, it’s vital to adapt your content and product information to what you know about your audience’s expectations.  Here are 5 key ways you should invest in product information:

1. Share your brand values through product content

Building strong relationships with people is only possible thanks to transparency. More than your products and services, people want to know more about your purpose, your mission, and thus your values. The more “real people” (usually the company founders or leaders) embody these values and share them, the better the impact they will have. Unfortunately, some brands struggle to do this well—if they do it at all. The good old “‘About Us Page” doesn’t always give us a sense of their history, personality, or passion. This is still too basic. So what are the best practices? Leading brands are doing a great job at expressing their ideas in an inspiring, engaging, and enticing way and a specific category of brands is ahead: the Digital Native Vertical Brands. You know, these brands that not only grow with their community but build the business with them. They share everything about the suppliers they work with, the material they use, their vision of the business, the concrete actions they take, and organizations they donate to. All this provides meaning for consumers, and thus higher engagement and growth.

Two great examples from Everlane and Sezane. 2. Educate on certificates & quality labels  Consumers are more familiar with product labels, and they know the most credible ones. The Oeko-Tex Standard 100 confirms the absence of harmful chemical substances is a perfect example. So if you spend money in obtaining these labels, sharing them with consumers via the product page is a first step; being transparent about how you get the label is another interesting one. 62% of consumers consider certificates and quality labels as the #1 information that demonstrates brand commitment. And this is not limited to the material used to create products. Being B Corp certified is recognised around the world, and testifies to the business partners’ work all along the supply chain. From the choice of production methods, raw materials and working conditions, to environmental footprint and engagement in the community, B-Corp certification requires a brand to undergo an intensive analysis, responding to over 200 questions. This is another great example to include alongside the standard information shown on a product’s description page. Consumers are keen to learn more about certifications. They want to understand their sneakers’ carbon footprint like they do calories in food.

B-Corp certification requires a brand to undergo an intensive analysis, responding to over 200 questions. 3. Guide your consumers to the right products If you invest in getting certifications and quality labels that matter for your consumers, it’s crucial for product discovery and search that they can filter e-commerce product lists according to their purchasing preferences. If users are unable to adequately filter product lists, their ability to tailor their shortlist to contain only items of interest is severely restricted and they may be unable to find what they need. The ability to use key information such as a certification or a quality label as a filter needs to be anticipated and managed in the central system you use to manage product information. Some PIM (product information management) software like Akeneo PIM Enterprise Edition makes it easy to update a whole range of products and create information that will be used as filters thanks to automatic rules based on information they contain.

Akeneo customer, Bergfreunde.com / L’alpiniste.fr, makes it easy for consumers to filter on what matters for them in term of sustainability. 4. Reappropriate your second-hand products The rising awareness around environmental issues and conscious spending has led consumers to buy more in the resale market. While saving money used to be the main factor driving second-hand shopping, consumers are now also eager to find eco-friendly products, meaningful gifts, or to get a more personalized experience that doesn’t involve shopping at big box stores. Companies have quickly understood that they have a big opportunity in reappropriating their second-hand products instead of letting people sell it on dedicated (online) stores or resales platforms such as Vinted, Vestiaire Collective, ThredUP or the RealReal. Big brands such as Patagonia and Isabel Marat have shown it’s possible to sell used products alongside new items; other brands can also tap into the trend by offering buy-back programs or easy recycling or resale options for used products. Promoting second-hand products alongside new ones requires a different approach to how products are discovered and described across the places where they are sold. This is where the best practices of Product Experience Management (PXM) come into play as part of a PIM implementation. You’ll save time, and make sure of the product data quality if you inherit information from a trusted foundation you have built (even from the oldest collections) instead of re-creating them.

Example from Akeneo customer, Isabel Marant, who has launched its vintage clothing boutique, available online, on June 21. Young consumers especially understand that conscious consumption and participating in the circular economy is key to reducing climate footprint. As a direct result of their awareness, Gen Z is driving much of the growth in the second-hand luxury market. As this has become a major issue worldwide, this is not limited to the Fashion industry. And because repair is better than replace, France has launched the Repairability Index in 2020 for electrical and electronic equipment and plans to replace it with a Durability Index, whereby manufacturers will disclose not only how repairable their goods are, but also describe the full lifecycle for each product.

Akeneo customer and French startup, Back Market, resells PlayStations, household appliances, and smartphones and raised $335 million in May 2021. 5. Switch to a more climate-friendly shipping solution and reduce packaging The demand for fast deliveries in e-commerce has never been higher. Already today, worldwide freight transport accounts for 8% of global carbon emissions, with last-mile shipping making up a large proportion of this footprint. Effective ways to reduce the impact of shipping from e-commerce are already available, and will continue to grow. Major carriers including DHL, FedEx and UPS offer environmentally-friendly programs such as paperless invoicing, carbon neutral shipping via carbon offsetting, and greener shipping options including bikes and electric vehicles. You can also reduce last-mile delivery by establishing convenient pick up points near customers or partners so that orders can be dropped off in one stop instead of driving to each customer individually. In any case, clearly display the possibilities you offer alongside your products. Retailers often use standard boxes to ship all items and fill the free space with additional packaging material. Shipping items in smaller boxes will not only avoid unnecessary packaging material and waste, but also saves space on the transport, making it more climate-friendly. Given that packaging makes up a big part of the e-commerce carbon footprint, this is a very important reduction lever for your company.

Zara ​boxes with a past. All cardboard boxes that arrive in stores are reused up to 5 times before being recycled into new boxes for online orders. Are you now ready to take action and enhance the key product information you can share with your consumers to make a difference? It may seem overwhelming at first if it’s something you haven’t started implementing yet. But as mentioned before, sharing how you are minimizing your carbon impact can have significant impacts on the loyalty of your customers and the growth of your business. Everyone at Akeneo is here to share their expertise and guide you along that green journey. All you have to do is ask!

Product Experience

What’s Next in Akeneo PIM?

They say that all feedback is a gift. And one piece of feedback we’ve received from our customers and partners is that they would like to see more c…

They say that all feedback is a gift. And one piece of feedback we’ve received from our customers and partners is that they would like to see more communication from us on what’s next in our product roadmap.

Each year at our annual user conference, we include a session that goes through the major development themes for the coming year, and we often discuss specific features we intend to deliver or even pre-announce products — sometimes it is hard to contain our excitement! But an annual overview isn’t enough. And new customers who join the Akeneo family right after the conference may have needed to wait nearly a year to get their update. It has even been noted by industry analysts that most vendors need to be more open with product roadmaps.

A new roadmap resource

In the spirit of openness and innovation — two of our core company values — we’re very pleased to announce the availability of our brand-new “What’s Next with Akeneo PIM” page that highlights some of the features our SaaS customers will see in the next few months, and a taste of what’s being researched and in early development for the longer term.

Check out the What’s Next page

 

Resources you have today

The Akeneo Help Center is a publicly accessible site where you can learn about Akeneo PIM features and capabilities in one handy place. In addition to help topics, we document all of the new features released on a monthly basis on our What’s New page which is updated on the 5th of every month. You can easily see what new features were added when, and what major area of functionality each features corresponds to.

By clicking on the “rocket” sidebar icon, you can easily filter and get a more complete view of features by release number, date, and functional area.

To recap: the What’s New page explains what has already happened, and the What’s Next page tells you what’s planned for future releases. We intend to update these pages regularly as features are released and as new capabilities are placed on the roadmap. So check both pages often!

Check out the What’s Next page

Product Experience

My PIM Journey

After spending 5 years implementing Akeneo PIM for all kinds of businesses across several territories, scaling product catalogs to address new digital…

After spending 5 years implementing Akeneo PIM for all kinds of businesses across several territories, scaling product catalogs to address new digital eCommerce challenges, and becoming a Product Marketing Manager and Evangelist 2 years ago, I realized that my personal PIM journey at Akeneo tells the same story as our PXM Maturity Model framework. I certainly grew with Akeneo customers, the same way Akeneo learned and grew with them too. The best is yet to come!

PXM Maturity Assessment

How mature is your organization? How can you take it to the next level?

Take the assessment! Take the assessment! Take the assessment!

  So when I opened a PIM for the first time, I have to admit that I did not get it immediately. I had never worked directly in the eCommerce industry (and the eCommerce team is rarely involved in an ERP implementation). What I could see on my screen was a lot of product edit forms! Which makes total sense, as the main goal of a PIM is to enrich product information and improve its quality. But at first, the scope seemed so small to me. After discovering all the features though, I totally got it. I just loved the marketing and customer-oriented approach. I was so ready to go onsite to work with many new colleagues: the eCommerce team, merchandising team, content team, studio team, and print catalog team. For me it was now super clear – ERP does support the supply chain and internal vision of the product, the PIM, the market, and the end consumer. As an experienced consultant, I spent my time listening to these people. One day during one particular project for a mass-market fashion brand, a young well-styled man interrupted one of our workshops to ask the Product Manager if the product he was about to showcase on their Instagram account was the right style, meaning the right color, and to make sure the product had not changed since the sample validation step. We know the impact it has on sales, so you can’t get this one wrong. At the time we were implementing a PIM to support an eCommerce platform migration for this fashion brand. So the project was 100% focused on the eCommerce part. But from that exact moment when the community manager with great fashion sense interrupted the workshop, I understood that a PIM project is much more than implementing another tool to only support one channel. It is about offering a new way of working for all the business users in a company. This community manager-turned-social-seller could have easily and quickly found this information in the PIM. Everywhere you sell and market products, there must be a PIM that establishes a strong foundation of your product data, that is always clean and available to share with all the touchpoints you have with your customers. Not just your social networks like this community manager asked about, but also your physical stores, the digital screens in-store, the sales app, the marketplaces you sell on, and yes, your own website(s).

From an eCommerce-oriented PIM to a channel-agnostic one

As soon as I understood the benefits of implementing a PIM, I started to re-think the workshops we delivered, and about the attendees of these sessions. But this implied challenging the project scope for each customer and making them understand how more teams could benefit from this new tool, and how it could solve a lot of product enrichment issues. Don’t get me wrong, it was not about questioning their strategy, but more about broadening the scope, opening this new goldmine to anyone dealing with or consuming product information. Behind each of your sales touchpoints, there is a team, or at least a human. And these people need to be empowered to understand that they won’t work in silos anymore but will work to support their company strategy, all collaborating with one single source of truth for their product information. So how did I learn to get buy-in and make a PIM project a success that involved everyone? How did I engage them in such a project? Basically, by rallying the troops! For the first workshop at one client, we advised our customer to invite all the people in the company that either enrich, contribute, or even just consume product information – which could lead to having over 30 people in the room at once. Yikes! The main goal we had was to make sure that:

• Everyone was aware of this new tool in the company.

• Everybody got the same level of knowledge: what is the PIM scope? How does it work with other systems already used (PLM, ERP mainly)? What does it mean for everyone’s daily work? It’s not about duplicating work or working for others… but about building a strong, healthy, common foundation to support the company’s growth.

• Everybody understood how they could benefit from this new tool: fewer informal requests, less manual (re)work, fewer e-mails, better relationships, smoother enrichment, and more digital processes.

After making sure all the teams were engaged and successfully able to create this smooth enrichment process, we needed to understand who is responsible for which piece of product information, and who depends on others for information. And we had to get answers to many specific questions: How do you create a product? Is a product a sample beforehand? Is it possible to start writing a description without at least a picture of the product? How is the assortment managed? Is a product available by default for all the markets you address, or do you have an assortment of products by market? Is there a team responsible for validating all the product information? Who makes sure it complies with market regulations? Who decides that a product is ready to be seen by and sold to end consumers?

At the end of the workshops, any stakeholders connecting to the PIM could understand what they had to do, and how to do this, without any additional training because everything would have been designed according to their way of working and their specific needs: from their workspace just showing the products they have to work on, to the language(s) they have to create content for, to the product information they are responsible for.  Ultimately, these people immediately adopted both the technology and the processes to help them, changing the way they worked for the better.

From a PIM to a PXM Studio

Feeling more than ready after this early customer, I was now mature enough to work with all kinds of companies with their different business challenges. Once the teams started to understand the power of collaboration and had product information ready for any new business challenge, they started thinking about broadening the scope of their collaboration with their external providers. For resellers, instead of receiving and dealing with a lot of different formats and spreadsheets, we started to think about making onboarding product data easier and faster. That’s precisely how Akeneo Onboarder was born, by the way! The same goes for the manufacturers I worked with. How could they share accurate information with their business partners, resellers, and marketplaces? Et voilà! Akeneo Shared Catalogs joined the family. The magic really started to happen for me when some companies heard about Akeneo and decided they, too, needed a PIM after some of their business partners mentioned they were saving time, rationalizing processes, and sharing better product data quality with this new way of working.  A lot of Akeneo customers work with other Akeneo customers: in the fashion industry, in cosmetics, in the B2B world, with specialized distributors. So many businesses in these areas are connected to or collaborate with others in one way or another. It is so great to connect people together, simplify their daily life, while all speaking the same language. One of the recurring questions I received from my customers during this time was “How long will the project last?” I have now a clear and irrevocable answer: “The project timing will only depend on how mature and ready you are with your product data dictionary and with your product enrichment lifecycle.”  If a company is clear on what a product is for them, then what their customers need to know about their products and their brand becomes much clearer too. And if every team knows which product information they are responsible for to make it the best it can be, and how doing so can address their business objectives, then they are well on their way to growth, success, and maturity. And this part of my story brings me to what Product Experience Management (or PXM) is all about. It’s how you can make sure your people, your processes, and your technology are orchestrated to efficiently deliver high-quality product information in the right context, adapted to the sales touchpoints and markets you address, all aligned with your business strategy. So that’s my journey of maturity in the world of PIM and PXM. How about you? If you’re wondering where you are on this path, go answer these 14 short questions to receive a personalized report with actionable insights all based on my 6 years of experience with discovering and building your peers’ maturity. I look forward to learning where you are on your journey!

PXM Maturity Assessment

How mature is your organization? How can you take it to the next level?

Take the assessment! Take the assessment! Take the assessment!

Akeneo News

Akeneo is now Headless Commerce Certified with Salesforce Commerce Cloud

Did you tune in a take a front-row seat at Dreamforce on Salesforce+ this week? There were a lot of great sessions and exciting announcements. Speakin…

Did you tune in a take a front-row seat at Dreamforce on Salesforce+ this week? There were a lot of great sessions and exciting announcements. Speaking of exciting… have you heard the news? In addition to the Akeneo Connector for Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Akeneo is pleased to announce that we have achieved Headless Commerce certification with Salesforce. This is a new certification and we are honored to be a “trailblazer” and among the very first Salesforce Partners to achieve this milestone.

Product Experience

Give customers the product information they want

Last week I logged online and began shopping for products that I intended to use in a very specific way. I needed a light-weight, escape-proof, portab…

Last week I logged online and began shopping for products that I intended to use in a very specific way. I needed a light-weight, escape-proof, portable prison cell for my 4 month-old Weimaraner puppy, and a monitor for my home office to replace my small laptop screen. 

I did a little research and had some specific criteria in mind for both products: The Corral

• 36 inches high (Weimaraner’s can jump)
• 72 inches in circumference (Weimaraner’s get big)

The Monitor

• 32 inches (big enough for spreadsheet work)
• IPS Panel Type (hardware guides told me this was best).

Much to my surprise, I found that validating these products against my criteria involved having to jump between multiple retailer’s websites to cross-reference SKUs and model numbers and do a lot more scrolling and squinting than I expected. In some cases, the product information I needed was embedded into long descriptions with no way to filter or search, and in other even worse cases, completely missing! These gaps in information made finding the product I wanted difficult. These retailers were failing to give prospective consumers critical information about the products they were trying to sell!

Filling in Product Information Gaps

The notion of using mandatory fields to govern the presence of critical information within your product catalog seems both obvious and easy to implement for retailers. The reality is quite different though. Product catalogs today are massive and the challenge of ensuring integrity across such a large amount of data is only part of the problem. In an increasingly competitive post-Covid landscape retailers must also ensure their data stands up to the intense scrutiny of discerning customers and search algorithms whose requirements are constantly changing; The “Set it and forget it” mindset of yesteryear no longer works, even in the B2B Industry. To properly validate the presence of important product information and ensure “Completeness” sellers need to be able to: 1. Define the unique combination of critical information consumers need for each product type. 2. Account for multiple versions of this critical information across languages, regions, and sales channels. 3. Quickly and efficiently identify and fix missing information across an entire product catalog. Let’s dig into these a little more: The starting point for all product governance is defining exactly which information consumers need. Most enterprises today measure their product catalogs in the tens or hundreds of thousands of products and offer a diverse range of products with radically different product characteristics. For example, a big box retailer may sell Washing Machines and Laptops alongside High Heels and Blue Jeans. The information consumers want for each of these four products is radically different, but they must coexist and be accounted for in the same catalog. In this case a properly built product catalog will have hundreds or even thousands of attributes organized in a taxonomy of discrete product-type structures where the unique requirements of each product type can be accounted for. You cannot have just a few global mandatory fields, you must tailor your mandatory fields to the unique requirements of each product type.

The next consideration in ensuring a Product’s completeness is accounting for the contextualization of the product’s information across languages, geographic regions, and sales channels. It’s not enough to know that the “Description” of the English version of our Product on our eCommerce Website in the U.S. is filled out; we also need to know that the Spanish version of our Product in our Syndication channel in Argentina is ready for our customer’s eyes. Every adaptation and translation of our product, no matter how subtle, must be accounted for as part of our completeness check.

We can’t talk about product completeness without also discussing how to repair these holes in our product catalog. This can be a massive effort. A catalog of 100,000 products with 50 attribute fields has 5,000,000 data points that need to be monitored and fixed. This is an almost insurmountable effort if this product information is spread across multiple sources of truth like an ERP, eCommerce website, or even Excel spreadsheets (which is more common than you may think). Just having a single place of maintenance like a PIM system greatly helps this effort. Next, you need to be able to track and analyze the completeness of your products across the entire catalog and within different product types, business groups, websites, and regions. Once we identify the missing information it’s important to have productivity tools, automation, and even solutions that can leverage suppliers to help fill in the gaps.

In my own endeavor, I ended up finding a Pet retailer site that gave me the exact specifications I needed and purchased a corral for my Weimaraner. This experience then led me to revisit the same site earlier this week when I needed to order a new collar because I was confident that I could validate what I was buying without having to cross-reference, scroll, or squint. In contrast, I struggled to validate the information for my monitor, which I decided was more of a “nice to have,” and gave up completely. The high-quality data of the Pet retailer earned my repeated business while the poor data from the Electronic retailers cost them a sale.

Customer experience depends on product experience

Many retailers today invest significant time and money to drive incremental improvements to their online customer experience by focusing on things like rich-content, SEO optimization, and merchandising. While these are all important considerations, what’s often forgotten is that these areas all have an underlying dependency on complete and accurate product data.  Companies who invest in the basics of building a strong foundation of complete product information find a positive ripple effect through all components of their digital commerce infrastructure that has a tangible impact on their bottom line. Stated simply, strive to exceed your customers’ expectations and provide them with more than enough compelling information to help them find what they need and desire from you, and not someone else.

Akeneo News

Akeneo named a Strong Performer in our debut in the Forrester Wave™: Product Information Management, Q2 2021

Forrester’s 2021 Wave on the Product Information Management vendor landscape is here. It’s not often that a first-time appearance in a market anal…

Read on for highlights from Forrester’s analysis of Akeneo PIM and what to take away from their points of view.

User Experience

The Forrester Wave analyzed the top 10 vendors in PIM along a set of 15 criteria. Akeneo received the highest score possible in the User Experience criterion. Specifically, Forrester states “Akeneo is one of a small handful of “born digital” PIM players; its user experience is a particular strength, with the company’s offering providing an intuitive and modern user interface. Reference customers praised Akeneo for its ease of use, describing its hierarchy management as “totally user friendly…”

In our view, ease of use is the gateway to user adoption. If your PIM is too difficult for your catalog management teams to use, or requires too much IT intervention, user adoption will suffer. Because Akeneo is designed for easy adoption, it means you can take your complex catalog hierarchies, high volume, multi-dimensional, multi-language, multi-geography product catalog and output simplicity for your users. In fact, some of our customers have 300+ users collaborating and contributing to PXM in Akeneo. Which makes sense when you consider that some individual Akeneo customers are managing 60MM+ products with us! The result is faster time to market, increased sales, decreased returns, and reduction in cost.

A best-of-breed PIM

In the Wave, Forrester notes that “While Akeneo positions as a platform to support product experience management, unlike many of its peers, the company strategy and innovation roadmap doubles down on optimizing product data for that goal as opposed to expanding into adjacent areas like DAM or commerce.”

Powering your business from one vendor with an all-in-one solution is a tempting vision: that you’ll get PIM, DAM, eCommerce, SEO, OMS, MDM, et al, in one vendor’s offering. Very often, what you’ll get is something that’s not actually great at any of the individual pieces. It’s very often an overpromise. Which is why we believe Forrester has a Wave for DAM, a Wave for MDM, two Waves for eCommerce (B2B & B2C), a Wave for SEO, and a Wave for OMS. If your priority is tackling your product information, it’s best if you hone in on a vendor that is obsessed with making you successful there.

Akeneo has always been squarely focused on PIM and the practice of PXM (Product Experience Management). Best-of-breed also means avoiding the dreaded “vendor lock-in.” With Akeneo, there’s no need to also rip out your eCommerce solution or your DAM solution or your ERP or your OMS. Instead, a best-of-breed solution relies on tight integrations with surrounding tools in your ecosystem. That’s why you’ll find that some of our customers are leveraging our powerful APIs to the tune of 10 million calls per week! And why some of our customers are managing over 1TB of digital assets in Akeneo PIM, either alongside a dedicated DAM that manages other non-product assets, or not. The Forrester report states that reference customers describe Akeneo’s integrations as “one of the strongest parts of the platform.” 

No one wants to be oversold when investing in mission-critical tools like PIM. Akeneo’s vision for your company is to leverage PIM in a similar way that you leverage CRM. PIM is to product information as a CRM is to customer information. With that in mind, your requirements to manage product information well, require a PIM solution that is focused on solving core PIM use cases and ensuring sophisticated integrations into other specialized systems.

Merchants with Any Business Model

Forrester notes that “Akeneo targets both B2C and B2B enterprises, with retail, construction, and food and beverage as top industries” and further summarizes that “Akeneo is a good fit for companies that need a PIM built for marketers with minimal IT support needed.”

With over 500 customers on our Enterprise Edition — and over 80,000 on our free-forever Community Edition — Akeneo is well-represented across many other industries too, spanning both B2B manufacturers and distributors, and B2C brands and retailers. The Akeneo PXM Studio includes dedicated offerings designed to enable internal and external contributors who participate in delivering great product experiences that drive growth, all oriented around Akeneo PIM.

Akeneo’s ability to meet the demands of each of these types of business models means that when you choose Akeneo, you choose a future-proof offering for your growth needs. Akeneo PIM was the critical centerpiece for many customers during Covid to enable a quick pivot of their business models from B2B to B2C (or vice versa) because Akeneo supported an easy adaptation of their catalog, quick time to market with new product lines, and ease in integrating to new channels and routes to market. The “phygital” buying experience is here to stay; in fact, a full 50% of Akeneo’s customers are selling in offline channels, in addition to the digital shelf. Who knows what channels your business will need tomorrow or what routes to market your CEO will demand? So you can rest assured, that regardless of your business model, Akeneo will be able to support you.

How to use the Forrester Wave for PIM

Industry analyst reports serve a valuable purpose by doing the initial triage of solutions in the market for you. The Forrester Wave for Product Information Management Q2 2021 presents Forrester’s view of the top 10 solutions, in effect creating a “short-list” of PIM vendors. Next, do some serious reflection on your use cases, business challenges, and priorities. We know there’s a lot of pain when it comes to managing product catalogs and potentially a lot of organizational silos and process challenges to overcome.

If you’re a marketer or catalog management professional and are seeking an easy-to-use solution that integrates with your current technology stack, and have the sense of urgency to rapidly deliver great product experiences to grow your business, contact us for more information. We’d love to help you out!

TL;DR – if you need to quickly mobilize your marketing teams with an easy-to-use and quick-to-adopt solution; easily integrate with your existing tech stack; and get your product catalog organized, enriched, and published on traditional channels and on the digital shelf, Akeneo is a very strong choice.

Download the Forrester Wave for PIM

Product Experience

The latest version of Akeneo PIM is here! [Akeneo 5.0]

The world moves at the speed of light these days — maybe even faster. That includes Akeneo PIM. That’s right. Our team of product information…

The world moves at the speed of light these days — maybe even faster. That includes Akeneo PIM.

That’s right. Our team of product information innovators and product experience experts has been hard at work all year to deliver continuously better ways to manage product information and create compelling product experiences across a wide array of locales and sales channels. To improve our already best-in-class PIM and provide a solution that can help you put good data governance in place and that can help you make sure your product data is accurate, consistent, and complete. A solution that can make connectivity to other platforms seamless, and one that can make every member of your product enrichment team productive. And, to get it to our dedicated and growing user base as quickly as possible. Over the past year, we’ve released more than 70 new features & improvements to our Akeneo PIM Enterprise Edition Serenity customers, and they will keep on benefiting from continuous delivery of the Akeneo PIM latest features and improvements. Now, these enhancements and features are available to our Flexibility and Community Edition customers with the release of Akeneo PIM 5.0! So what have the product experience experts here at Akeneo come up with and how can this new version help you and your team unlock your growth? Let’s dive in and take a closer look at some of the latest features and improvements included in our latest Akeneo PIM version.

More automation thanks to a revamped rules engine

You don’t want your team spending their time on redundant, repetitive manual tasks. That’s why we added a rules engine many years ago in Akeneo PIM. Now, we are bringing automation to the next level with a revamped rules engine featuring the Rules Builder, a new screen in Akeneo PIM that will enable users to more easily create and manage business rules. This screen takes all actions from YML files (which will remain available) and empowers marketing teams to automatically categorize products, copy attribute values, set default values, and more, all without the help of an IT team. With this revamp, our product team also introduced new rule actions which allow them to automate new actions, including the creation of harmonized product titles and dynamic product descriptions, making enrichment even faster and easier for your team.

Effortless and seamless connectivity 

Want improved connectivity? We’ve got you covered. Akeneo PIM 5.0’s API improvements will ease data synchronization and distribution with third-party applications. To that end, we’ve introduced a brand new API, known as the “Events API” to accelerate the synchronization of data between Akeneo PIM and 3rd-party applications. This new API is complementary to our existing REST API, which is not left out, and also benefits from new and improved endpoints to help reduce the amount of data to process and the size of the API call responses. This new release also comes with enhancements on Connections that empower users to better track data sent and received and give them more autonomy to act on synchronization errors.

An enhanced Data Quality Insights dashboard 

With Akeneo PIM 5.0, your team can not only move more quickly but also easily monitor their product information quality and get actionable insights to see at a glance which areas of their catalog need additional improvements thanks to our enhanced Data Quality Insights dashboard. This new and improved dashboard is designed to make it easier than ever for your teams to monitor the quality of your product data and get recommendations on how to improve it. The dashboard provides product enrichment teams with clear, actionable insights to help them fix problematic product data, and even includes a reworked Data Quality Score, which allows you to grade data quality and compliance with ease. Data Quality Insights becomes even more helpful with advanced spell-check features and language coverage to match global organization needs!

Add your own measurement units

Akeneo PIM’s latest release also offers users the enhanced level of catalog and product structure flexibility they need to adjust their catalogs to their business needs. Akeneo PIM now includes advanced Measurements capabilities designed to give users increased flexibility when enriching product information. Users can now easily create custom units of measurement and measurement families to fit their needs, in addition to the wide range of traditional and standard measurements that are already available in the PIM, meaning you can now easily add any new measurement you need to remain in compliance with local norms or specific industry requirements.

And there’s more to come!

That’s just a few of the amazing new capabilities we’ve added in Akeneo PIM 5.0 and in Akeneo PIM Enterprise Edition Serenity. There are many other improvements in the latest edition of Akeneo PIM which include features like easier product modeling capabilities, advanced assets and reference entities import and export features, enhancements to our product grid, and new private views designed to allow users to better organize their tasks and daily work. And there are more on the way! We’ve got plenty of other great features and improvements on our roadmap for 2021 and beyond. So, if you want to get more value from your investment in PIM, have better control over your product data, improve your connectivity, and help your team become more productive than ever, you need the most powerful PIM solution available, upgrade to or get Akeneo PIM 5.0. If you want to be always on the leading edge of the latest PIM features and improvements, and be relieved of maintenance and hosting pains, have a look at our Akeneo PIM Serenity Edition.