We’re forever grateful to all who participated. And as with any competition, we had the difficult job of naming a winner, and in 2021, that winner is our US-based implementation partner Sitation. Sitation chose to create a real-time integration from Akeneo to ElasticSearch, a powerful hosted search index, by using the new Akeneo Events API for subscriptions to real-time product create, update, and delete events.

Why is this cool? Sitation used the power of the Akeneo API to deliver product information in near real-time. Their solution avoids scheduled publishing via heavyweight integrations. It further supports customers who are implementing microservices architectures and headless solutions, providing scalability and flexibility in search. We think you’ll agree that it’s really cool – and useful! So, congratulations to Sitation, winner of the Unlock 2021 Hackathon. We look forward to having hackathons in the future. What cool new idea will you come up with? We can’t wait to see what’s next!

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.

The world of digital sales is undergoing revolutionary change with never-before-seen scale, speed, and complexity. The old ways of selling and serving customers and delivering products are no longer valid for many brands. This revolution in digital sales has created new global competition where customer experience is crucial to success. As a result, companies who formerly lagged are finally taking steps toward digital transformation. Leading brands understand that this is not only the era of technology, but also the era of the customer. Technology is needed, but customer understanding is everything. This is a wake-up call to build a winning digital sales machine and put experience at the center of your business. In this new normal, the only sustainable way to gain a competitive advantage is based on the speed at which an organization can respond to changing customer and market needs. Merchants need a high level of organizational agility and other dynamic capabilities to deliver on customers’ expectations of continuous availability and adaptiveness, as well as their increased interest and concern about ethics, sustainability, and corporate transparency. Building a winning digital sales machine means product brands must find new ways of enabling success with their products and services, together with their customers and partners. Therefore, product brands must seek to make it easy for customers to experience the brand. The omnichannel environment of digital, physical, and social channels is built on interaction. Experiences create value through these interactions. In this experience economy, a compelling product experience is critical, and dynamic organizational capabilities that enable amazing customer experiences need to stand out.

Enabling product experience for digital sales

Product experience is very much a journey, as customers shop and research products in multiple places, and potentially over a period of time. Leading brands understand that value is created based on interaction and collaboration in the buying and selling ecosystem. Omnichannel increases the need for contextualized and relevant experiences for customers. These different touchpoints in the ecosystem represent opportunities to form and strengthen the bond between the brand and its customers and business partners. These are the moments when the product experience needs to stand out! To deliver superior product experiences, sellers must have the appropriate functional capabilities in place to create and manage these product experiences that drive digital sales. With the right capabilities and resources, brands will have a solid base on which to build digital experiences that lead to sales.

Enablement by technology

First-class product experiences need fuel to come alive. Consistent and relevant product information representing the brand is the fuel to support sales of products and product-related services. To create a unified view and to control product information across the organization, different technologies must integrate or interoperate to meet business and stakeholder requirements. Typical technologies that play a role in managing the product experience include ERP, DAM, and PIM systems.

Digital architecture and dexterity

Compelling product content representing the brand is not much help if it cannot be efficiently delivered to different digital sales channels in the right form and at the right time. In addition to product information, product availability, learning materials, dynamic pricing, delivery tracking, and more, complete the experience Therefore, product brands should have a sufficient capability to develop a digital architecture that supports flexible and scalable ways of delivering the product experience, and that offers seamless integration for internal and external teams involved in managing product experiences. Product brands also need dexterity to be both efficient today and to be adaptable for coping with changing demands of tomorrow.

Context

Compelling product content is driven by context. Customers experience products across digital, physical, and social channels, and to provide the right information, products need to comply with the requirements for each channel. For example, social selling via Instagram has different product listing requirements than a B2B sales portal. Therefore, brands need to be able to easily accommodate channel-specific requirements while avoiding inconsistency across channels – as well as across regional markets.

Your team

Creating compelling product content requires a capable team with the motivation to strive for delivering better product experiences. Cross-functional end-to-end business teams ensure that all aspects of the brand, products, customers, and business are considered when crafting the product/brand experience. As products and services are the tools companies use to serve their stakeholder needs, product experience should be considered a competitive advantage and become an organization-wide endeavor. For product brands, this is especially important since the whole identity of the company is built on the brand and its message.

Building a winning digital sales machine

Building a winning digital sales machine comes down to creating value for the customer through field sales operations, supporting the partners to learn and excel in sales, and moving from selling products to selling new services. In all of these, the common enabler for increasing sales, customer experience, and growth is the compelling product experience. Technology, digital architecture, the way of working (processes), and experience delivery are some of the core capabilities needed for first-class product experiences. However, it is all about matching organizational capabilities and resources with those of customers and internal stakeholders across all touchpoints. To win, you must understand everyone’s needs, the way they operate, and what they need to succeed. It’s also crucial to understand that the real value in a compelling product experience is not created inside the organization in certain systems or with only technology — you also must understand your internal stakeholders’ world and enable them for success. Only then is it possible to build dynamic organizational capabilities for product experience management and find a match across the digital sales field for crafting a memorable experience. Technological capability creation is only the start of your product experience journey to encourage rethinking value creation in digital sales. However, by enabling your development with a strong technology and process base, the next steps — and capabilities needed — to deliver a first-class customer and product experience will be easier to take. Learn more about Vincit’s PXM implementation methodology here.

Akeneo’s in-person user conferences have traditionally been oriented around a theme, and this year’s virtual event was no different — Unlocking Growth Through Product Experiences. The Akeneo headquarters was transformed into a scene reminiscent of the time of “extraordinary voyages” as described in the works of French novelist Jules Verne, who, like Akeneo, was born in Nantes. Read on as we take a short walk down memory lane and revisit some of the best moments from Unlock 2021.

Opening Keynote

Akeneo CEO Fred de Gombert opened the conference with a conversation with emcee Francois Chaix to discuss his personal experiences with online shopping during the “extraordinary voyage” that was 2020, and the impact that it had on the world of commerce. “If 2020 taught us one thing, it’s back to basics,” he said. “The job is to sell products. And so wherever products are sold, we need to ensure that the product itself creates a compelling experience.” The conversation turned on the discussion about customer experience versus product experience. “For years, retailers have been urged to massively invest in customer experience. But then came lockdowns, and what happened? No stores. No more fancy customer experiences,” Fred continued. “One impact from 2020 has been the sudden acceleration of digital channel adoption. Suddenly, managing the product experience became a bottleneck for growth. And PXM has become a real transformation for the long term.” Fred was quick to conclude, however, that “PXM is not only about technology. It is also about people and process.”

Panel Discussion

Unlock 2021 sponsors Vaimo, BigCommerce, Productsup, and Translations.com joined Fred following his keynote. This lively session of Akeneo partners shared perspectives on how to define and think of product experience management, the main components of what makes a good product experience, and who has ownership within an organization for creating and managing those experiences. The panel also discussed whether PXM was relevant for only B2C, or whether B2B organizations should worry about it. On this point, the panel was in universal agreement — the product experience is more important in B2B. For manufacturers who use printed catalogs, it’s critical to avoid any information mismatch in content parity across channels. The panel also advised that as B2B companies continue to implement direct-to-customer (D2C or DTC) strategies, the product experience needs to be better and more consistent in order to reduce pressure on the total cost of sale.

PXM Maturity Assessment

Following up on Fred’s and the panel’s comments about PXM and its adoption, Akeneo’s PXM Evangelist Virginie Blot and head of product marketing Ali Hanyaloglu discussed the results to date from Akeneo’s PXM Maturity Assessment. This online tool asks 14 multiple-choice questions to assess an organization’s maturity in the areas of people, process, and technology to ensure great product experiences, and offers actionable recommendations on changes you can make. According to the responses, one-third of senior management is still blind to the strategic value of quality product information and the impact it has on driving growth. Furthermore, results to date show that 73% are unhappy with the way collaboration works today. According to Virginie and Ali, “The importance of collaboration across internal teams will have a large impact on the success of your product information management processes.”

Gallery of Great Product Experiences

In the above sessions, we discussed why PXM is so important, how to approach the practice, and the state of PXM today. But what does a good product experience look like? The gallery of great product experiences session looked at some B2C and B2B examples from Akeneo customers who we think are delivering the kinds of experiences customers want and expect. Take a look — how does your product experience measure up?

Customer-led Sessions

Half a dozen Akeneo customers offered insights and lessons learned from their PXM journeys to unlock growth in their businesses, whether by expanding their catalog, adding new channels, or entering new markets. They all echoed the comments from the opening keynote about transformation, change, experimentation, and the need for compelling product experiences. Evelyne Cardinal from Solotech, an audio-visual and entertainment technology services company, talked about how, with the demise of in-person events in 2020, Solotech leveraged Akeneo PIM to enable a rapid move to selling used audio equipment via eCommerce which  led to significant growth in that part of their business. “We initially chose Akeneo PIM Community Edition because it looked easy, and it took IT just a few hours to get it ready,” said Evelyne. “We decided to migrate to Enterprise Edition to create automation in our process. What’s great is as we migrate to our new eCommerce platform, there’s no need to recreate the catalog.” European footwear retailer Melvin & Hamilton offered insights for how PIM helped their move to expand into new markets. Anja Skolozdrzyk noted, “With Akeneo we can work on translations simultaneously, which we could not do on our ecommerce platform, which saved us 50% in time and effort.” Anja also offered advice for companies looking to fast-track their growth: “Think easy and think big. Choose tools that will facilitate your work and allow you to grow fast.” Office supplies retailer and business services firm Staples Canada dove into the world of PXM as part of a complete digital transformation across their business. Jeff Serota advised us that “Taking the position ‘that’s the way we did it before’ is never a good thing when you’re going through a transformation.” As a result, Staples completely retooled and revised their processes to enable them to better serve their customers. As Jeff stated, “For Staples, product experience is about what our customers are looking for, what they need and want, in order to work and learn more effectively.” French fashion brand Zadig & Voltaire offered insights into unlocking growth as part of their omnichannel sales strategy. According to Global CIO Fabien Delivre, “For the omnichannel experience we wanted to offer, we needed one source of truth for every sales touchpoint” and the best way Zadig & Voltaire saw to achieve that was through greater efficiency and fewer manual operations in order to speed time to market. South African furniture and home goods retailer JD Group offered many interesting thoughts on the importance of PXM in unlocking growth through catalog expansion, and had the business results to back it up. Garreth Trent noted that “Online customers can’t interact with people who can recommend and explain products, so online product data needs to act like a salesperson.” He also remarked that “Consistent product data and marketing messages help our customers trust us, and they’ll find a similar experience on every channel.” JD Group’s results have been impressive — they grew their catalog from 6,000 to 20,000 products, and cut the time to prepare products for sale from 6 days to 6 hours. Impressive, indeed! Hotel chain Accor Group had a different yet highly interesting twist on how PXM helps their business. They used Akeneo to help achieve a digital transformation in their procurement process. Their idea was to take B2C marketplace standards and adapt them for B2B, with a special focus on product information. According to Emmanuel Barbosa, “PIM is a real must-have. It helps us enhance our business relationships with our suppliers and become more mature in the customer relationship. As a result, we have really achieved our digital transformation in our procurement processes with our suppliers and partners.”

Product Highlights & Demonstrations

In Akeneo PIM Summits of the past, there are always several sessions focused on new products and new features released in the prior year, and Unlock 2021 was no different. Our product managers delivered a series of product highlights sessions as well as some deeper dives into the products which included short demonstrations of new capabilities and products. The What’s New in Akeneo PIM 5.0 session recapped some of the notable enhancements released to our SaaS customers on a monthly basis over the past year, culminating in the 5.0 version. Due to time constraints we could not discuss the more than 70 new features, but they are documented and easily found in the Help Center! Two of the sessions were dedicated to drilling down into enhancements in two exciting Enterprise Edition features – the first one on Data Quality Insights and the second on the new user interface for the Rules Engine. With these enhancements, catalog management teams can more easily understand the state of data quality by product and across the entire catalog, as well as build their own business rules to simplify and automate product data enrichment – no coding required!

As discussed by Fred and in the PXM Maturity Assessment session, PXM is also about people and process. A session on governance and productivity enhancements gave an overview of areas of the Akeneo PIM technology that were improved to support these two equally-important pillars of PXM. As we like to say, a PIM by itself is useless, so Unlock 2021 also featured a session on what’s new with Akeneo’s premium connectors on the marketplace and a session on product data synchronization. The latter session covered new ways to manage connections between the PIM and the systems that surround it, which is so critical to ensuring a smooth integration from raw product data to compelling experiences delivered to eCommerce platforms and more. Further on the subject of collecting and distributing product data, a product highlight session covered enhancements in Akeneo Onboarder – used for onboarding supplier product data – and a new product called Shared Catalogs, which makes it easy to share published product information with internal and external stakeholders. This session was supplemented by separate talks which offered additional details and demonstrations of Akeneo Onboarder and Akeneo Shared Catalogs. With the addition of the new Shared Catalogs product, Akeneo’s offering has expanded yet again. A session describing the Akeneo PXM Studio explains how everything fits together and supports the practice of product experience management. Speaking of new products, we also announced the availability of a new PIM offering called Akeneo Growth Edition. This session described this new offering that is targeted at helping small/medium businesses compete by delivering better product experiences, but using the same type of technology that larger enterprises use. With Growth Edition, customers have a proven SaaS-based PIM that gives access to many of the same core capabilities from our fully-featured Enterprise edition. If you were unable to attend Unlock 2021, which ran nearly the entire month of April, you’re still in luck! Just click the links embedded above, or browse and watch them in the Videos section of our Resource Center. See you next year (and hopefully in person!).

That’s because attracting new buyers is all about providing compelling product experiences that are built on a foundation of accurate, consistent, and complete product information. But these smaller players typically don’t have the resources that large competitors have in their arsenals when it comes to enriching product information and using it to create the high-quality product experiences that convert shoppers into customers. Enter Akeneo PIM Growth Edition. It’s designed to provide a proven, SaaS-based PIM that offers access to many of the same core capabilities from Akeneo’s fully-featured Enterprise Edition. It’s focused on helping smaller organizations improve that product information management process and start their PXM Journey. So, what is Akeneo PIM Growth Edition, exactly? Let’s take a closer look.

Efficiently gather, organize, and standardize product data

Effectively managing product information starts with collecting and centralizing your data in one place. But this data exists in a wide variety of systems, including internal sources like your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, marketing database, other systems, and external sources such as suppliers, which can make data collection a challenge. With Akeneo PIM Growth Edition, smaller organizations can easily and efficiently gather product information from virtually any source into a single place. This includes data sourced from your ERP, difficult-to-use Excel files, or any other source. It even offers tools such as connectors, APIs, and import features to collect data from various applications. You can then use Akeneo PIM Growth Edition to standardize product information and organize your data according to the needs of your product catalog and business strategy. It also gives smaller teams the flexibility to design and adapt your catalog structure, including categories, families, channels, and locales. This makes it easier to categorize products, including supporting product variants (i.e., products that vary by color, size, etc.), and organize your product data for the requirements for different channels and languages.

Enrich and contextualize product data with ease

Once your product data has been gathered into a single system of record, you’ll need to enrich your products — and put them in the proper context for the channel you’re selling on. That’s why Akeneo PIM Growth Edition allows SMBs to easily and efficiently enrich their product information with all the vital information and digital assets. This can include such as technical data, usage data, emotional data, and even media files like images, PDFs, and videos — anything your customers need to feel confident making a purchase. That way, you can easily and efficiently deliver great product experiences across a wide range of channels. Then, Akeneo PIM Growth Edition can help you put products into the proper context for both the locale and channel that you sell your products on. This ensures that your content is relevant and impactful to customers, creating compelling emotional bonds that motivate conversions.

Send the right data to the right channels

After you have a complete catalog tailored for different markets and channels, this catalog will need to be distributed across your owned channel. So, once product data has been enriched and contextualized, we can also help you get that data where it needs to go. Product marketers can use Akeneo PIM Growth Edition features like Export profiles to distribute only the necessary and route it to the desired channel and locale. You can even filter export data based on several products or select attributes, families, categories, and identifiers, then save the profiles for future use. With Akeneo PIM Growth Edition you also have access to many of the same export capabilities and connectors that are in Enterprise Edition. This includes connectors for popular eCommerce Platforms and syndication tools from the Akeneo Marketplace. 

Unlock growth with Growth Edition

For smaller organizations standing out and attracting customers in an increasingly crowded marketplace is often the biggest move that can be made to help fuel and unlock future growth. The best way to attract those customers is to provide compelling product experiences across a wide range of sales channels. If you want to unlock growth for your small team, you need Akeneo PIM Growth Edition! It’s got exactly what smaller organizations need to expand their customer base and win over new buyers by providing top-notch product experiences built on a solid foundation of accurate, consistent product info. Plus, because Akeneo PIM Growth Edition is available in the cloud as a hassle-free SaaS offering, teams of any shape and size can access their PIM instance virtually anytime, anywhere. And just like Akeneo PIM Enterprise Edition, Growth Edition comes with the backing of our amazing Customer Success and technical support, meaning you’ll never have to travel the path of your PXM journey alone. So if you want to give your small, but expanding, business the tools it needs to unlock growth in the omnichannel age, give them Akeneo PIM Growth Edition!

Then, just over a year ago, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic began to rear their ugly head in the form of lockdown and store closures, forcing those who still preferred legacy shopping channels to embrace eCommerce. Sales shot up sharply as a result, growing by 44% to represent more than 20% of all sales last year. Even now, with a vaccine in circulation and the full-time opening of physical stores hopefully on the horizon, many experts expect a large proportion of those who have started shopping online to keep up the habit even after the pandemic has passed. So, with eCommerce clearly here to stay, how can you take advantage of this growing market and unlock massive eCommerce growth?

Perfect your eCommerce experience

With more shopping being done online comes increased competition from companies looking for their slice of the growing eCommerce pie. That means you need to stand apart from the crowd by giving your customers not only technical details, but also more value-added information like usage information, and emotional information such as compelling product descriptions and high-quality imagery. You should also make sure you are delivering the information customers want along their buying journey. For example, if your customers want to know where you stand on issues that are important to them, broadcast your brand values and share information about responsible sourcing, country of origin, and steps you’re taking to ensure your products are environmentally friendly and sustainable. How do you do that? In this example, it means adding relevant filters in your eCommerce platform, fed by a complete range of product attributes that correspond to your brand values. A good PIM solution will help you gather your data into one single source of truth, enrich your product information, and put it in the proper context for the channel it’s on. It will also provide you with a tool to help you create and manage high-quality digital assets such as photos, videos, and anything else you can use to win over eCommerce shoppers. American scientific equipment manufacturer Midland Scientific, for example, turned to PIM to create better eCommerce experiences, cutting costs and boosting revenue along the way.

Support the buying journey

Just like snowflakes, no two customers are alike — they’ll want and expect different things from their eCommerce experience. Many customers, for instance, expect to be able to search for exactly the product they want within your eCommerce site and find it at the drop of a hat. Others will want to be able to buy items online and then pick them up from their local brick-and-mortar store in order to save on shipping or get their product more quickly. No matter what it is, expanding your eCommerce offerings requires you to have a mastery of every aspect of your product information. So, find a PIM solution that makes expanded eCommerce offerings — like site search and BOPIS (buy-online-pick-up-in-store) — easy and efficient by giving you a powerful product information management platform that’s ready for whatever’s next. Rural King, for instance, added BOPIS to their offering to give customers more options and cater to their needs, boosting both in-store foot traffic and revenue along the way

Pick up the pace

Once you’ve got your product experience up to par, it’s time to pick up the pace and give your team more chances to convert customers by accelerating time-to-market and boosting enrichment efficiency. By getting products to market more quickly, you can give your team more selling days, helping to raise eCommerce revenue. You can also be more flexible, adaptable, and prepared to respond to changes in your supply chain or sudden shifts in market trends. Boosting efficiency and accelerating time-to-market can also boost revenue by helping you to cut enrichment costs. To unlock the potential eCommerce growth offered by more efficient enrichment processes, make sure you find a PIM that helps your team work more efficiently without increasing manual errors. Look for a solution that offers automation and a business rules engine that can take tedious, manual tasks off your team’s plate and leave them free to focus on creating great experiences for your customers. Your solution should also be able to identify bad product information and suggest ways to fix it. With Akeneo PIM, we offer a data quality insights feature that checks for the presence of images with products, correct spelling, proper upper and lower case usage, and whether required attributes are enriched. Scoring across these attributes further helps focus your team on only the work the needs to be completed before products are ready to sell.

Unlock eCommerce growth

Succeeding in an increasingly crowded and competitive eCommerce landscape means standing out from the crowd with a compelling product experience built on a foundation of accurate, complete, and consistent product data. That’s where Akeneo PIM comes in — it has everything you need to gather, standardize, enrich, contextualize, and distribute your product data. Plus, it can help you accelerate time-to-market and speed up your enrichment process, giving you more selling days and slashing enrichment costs, all without increasing the number of errors in your product information. But that’s not all. With our innovative open source architecture and wide-ranging network of partners, you can easily integrate your Akeneo PIM instance with the leading eCommerce platforms, including  Magento, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Shopify, Big Commerce, Oro Commerce, and many more. Just visit the Akeneo Marketplace to see the dozens of extensions we have to help you take your eCommerce experience to the next level.

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.

That’s because building a dynamic PXM practice requires you to have the right processes, people, and tools in place, all working together to create outstanding experiences for your customers on every channel you sell on. And that’s not something that most companies can set up overnight! With so much to do in order to take your PXM practice to the next level, it can be hard to know where to even begin. That’s why Akeneo is holding a new webinar, The Building Blocks to Elevate Your Product Experience, taking place at 11 AM EST/ 5 PM CET on Wednesday, March 3. In this webinar, Akerneo’s senior director of demand generation, John Evans, and our PXM evangelist, Virginie Blot, will look at examples of great product experiences from leading merchants and brands and discuss the best practices for processes, people, and technology that can help prepare your company to unlock growth through better product experiences. Register now to discover

• Best practices for assessing your organization’s PXM maturity
• Tips for tackling technological, organizational, and human challenges
• Key building blocks for mastering product experience management

In years past, our annual gathering was typically held in-person in Paris, France, and welcomed hundreds of PIM and PXM devotees from around the globe. But obviously, due to health and safety concerns, we were forced to call-off our in-person festivities. That doesn’t mean we won’t be getting together to celebrate all things PIM and PXM, however! The show must go on, and so we are thrilled to announce a new virtual event: Unlock 2021! So, what is Unlock 2021? It’s our digital reimagining of APS! The event will feature a mix of forward-looking keynote presentations, best practices, technical workshops, customer testimonials — and of course, product announcements, and a look at our product roadmap. More importantly, it will remain an inclusive experience where every part of our community plays a role, sharing challenges, lessons, achievements, and breakthroughs. This year’s event is all about unlocking growth in the new year by expanding to new geographic markets, conquering new sales channels, and growing your product assortment. We want to help as many people as possible embrace the potential of PIM, build their PXM practice, and unlock growth for their organizations, so this year’s event is designed to be as inclusive as possible! And, to meet the exploding demand for PIM and PXM, Unlock 2021 will be open to all! Unlock 2021 kicks off on April 6 and runs throughout the entire month of April, which means you can experience the event on your own schedule! Plus, attendance is free, and because the event is all online, you can attend from your sofa, office, or anywhere else you like. So register now, and get ready to join us at Unlock 2021 and discover how you can use PIM and PXM to unlock growth!

In fact, it’s said so often that it often becomes rote, leaving merchants confused about what exactly taking an agile approach means for their business. But just because taking an agile approach has become somewhat overused doesn’t mean it’s not important. On the contrary, that’s exactly why the phrase became so common in the first place. So what does taking an agile approach really mean when it comes to managing product information? What are the benefits of adopting one? And how can you successfully and sustainably apply an agile approach to your business?

The need for an agile approach

First, let’s take a look at what an agile approach to product information management really means. Taking an agile approach to PIM means prioritizing flexibility and adaptability both in your technology stack and in your product enrichment processes. It also allows for increased learning and experimentation by promoting small, incremental innovation steps rather than huge projects where it’s easy to fall behind, allowing companies to adapt better when the need arises. An agile approach also calls for cross-functional teams to improve product data. That way, if product catalog and product data specialists are part of these cross-functional squads, they’ll develop a new perspective and better understanding of the role of said product data. Why does all of this matter? Because market conditions and trends are ever-changing (just look at the past year if you need proof) and you need to be able to roll with the punches in order to keep up in the quickly shifting omnichannel commerce space. The number of channels, as well as the amount of innovation on these channels, is ever-increasing, and new ways to reach customers are always arising, leading to new buying habits and expectations with customers for both B2B and B2C companies. Many companies have also changed their assortments — and added new suppliers — in response to changing customer demand during the pandemic. That means you need to be able to flexibly accommodate changes to your product information and catalog and ready to make changes on a dime.

There are no shortcuts

Okay, so speed and agility are clearly crucial to success — how do you pick up the pace? It can be tempting to find shortcuts to help you gather, standardize, enrich, contextualize and distribute product data. But you can’t take shortcuts when it comes to product enrichment! A waterfall methodology for product enrichment can be a barrier to moving quickly. In this approach, you need to wait for each step to be complete before moving on to the next one. If your product enrichment process is slow and inefficient, it will slow time-to-market, which results in lost selling days and lost revenue. To speed things up, you may be tempted to take shortcuts, from which a host of bad things can result. This includes low-quality product data filled with errors, inconsistencies, and incomplete information, which leads to lower customer trust, decreased conversion rates, and increased returns. A great example of a company that benefited from a more agile, easy-to-use PIM tool is Midland Scientific, a distributor of scientific instruments. They needed to change their product enrichment process in order to keep pace with a rapidly growing product line. They were able to rapidly onboard remote seasonal workers such as college students to successfully use Akeneo PIM to enrich products in a matter of weeks, helping them move more quickly without sacrificing data quality. Other agile PIM success stories include companies like French grocery chain Franprix, which was able to use PIM to fix product information problems in just 45 days, and SLV, a German lighting manufacturer and seller that used a minimum viable PIM strategy to cut enrichment time and costs by more than 80%.

Take an agile approach to product information management

So how do you take an agile approach to PIM without taking shortcuts? The key to rapidly getting value from the agility a flexible and adaptable PIM can bring is to take a “minimum viable product” (MVP) implementation approach, one that can help you get your PIM solution online quickly in order to provide accurate, consistent, and compelling product information and better product experiences for your customers. Start by looking for a solution that allows you to start quickly with an “MVP” execution. But not all PIM tools are alike — some take a more waterfall-style approach and require all decisions about the structure to be designed at the beginning. So, make sure you choose a solution that allows you to implement PIM in an as-you-go manner so that your catalog structure can be easily modified and extended as your PIM implementation matures. If you are not sure how to begin taking an agile approach, it’s a worthwhile investment to get an expert on board who can help you to develop agile methods. It’s easy to think you’re agile because of new software or solutions, but it is actually a whole set of methods and a new mindset that takes a bit of effort to adopt. The results for those that are willing to adopt this new mindset, however, can be significant. They include accelerated PIM implementation times, shorter enrichment times, accelerated time-to-market, reduced enrichment costs, increased adaptability, and better product experiences. Add that all up, and with help from Akeneo PIM and an agile approach to product experience management, you’ll see climbing conversion rates and increased revenue!