Following the cloud launch, we announced a change in our product release cycle. Our objective was to provide a more nimble and responsive approach to market demands and to more rapidly deliver new product enhancements on a predictable schedule. For the most part, we have delivered on this promise! Quarterly releases consisting of two short-term support (STS) versions and two long-term support (LTS) per year have arrived either on schedule or shortly after the planned release date. After two years, we have received feedback from many customers that it can be difficult to keep up with this release cadence, especially if they are on-premises or Flexibility Mode (PaaS) customers. Planning upgrades and executing them can be time-consuming and require coordination across several teams. This issue was particularly acute for x.3 and x.0 releases which occurred 90 days apart and were both LTS versions. Serenity Mode (SaaS) customers received new features automatically every 90 days — but even then, certain incremental improvements and enhancements could have been available even sooner. Another challenge from our frequent release cycle is ensuring that the connectors and extensions developed and maintained by our technology partners are compatible with the latest releases. Our ecosystem is a very strong source of business value for Akeneo customers and we want to encourage it to grow and easily keep pace with our product releases. Based on this customer and partner feedback, we have decided to further simplify our release cycle in order to better support everyone whether you’re an on-premises customer, a Flexibility Mode customer, a Serenity Mode customer, or a technology partner who develops extensions and connectors for the PIM.

What’s the new release schedule?

For on-premises and Flexibility Mode customers, our new release cycle will make it even easier to plan for upgrades and will reduce the number of upgrades necessary to keep pace with the latest feature and performance improvements. Instead of two STS versions followed by two LTS versions each 90 days apart, we’ll release one major version every year for our on-premises and Flexibility Mode customers. These releases will be Long Term Support versions, which will remain at 18 months. Consequently, we will no longer do STS releases! This will reduce technical support complexity and confusion about how long your version is supported, as well as simplify project and upgrade planning for you and your solution partner or integrator. For Serenity Mode customers, our new release schedule will enable us to deploy new features and improvements on a monthly basis instead of quarterly. You’ll receive more business value more frequently, with Akeneo taking care of upgrades on your behalf as we do today. For planning purposes, our current release schedule and status of support will be as follows:

• To support this transition, Akeneo PIM version 3.2 (shipped in July 2019) was announced as an STS version, but we will now consider it an LTS version and will support it through January 2021.
• We will not release a “3.3” LTS release in October as previously planned.
• The next major LTS release (version “4.0”) will occur in early 2020 approximately at the time of our annual Akeneo PIM Summit, and every 12 months thereafter. As always, should there be the need for patches in between annual releases, we’ll provide them as required.
• SaaS releases will occur at the end of each week and your SaaS instance will be automatically upgraded by our team.

Here’s what the release schedule looks like in full color mode! We believe this new release cycle will enable Akeneo to better serve our customers on all deployments while reducing disruption and simplifying version management and technical support for all. And we’re really excited about the new enhancements we are currently developing for 2020. We can’t wait to see you at Akeneo PIM Summit 2020 to tell you all about it!

DMEXCO 2019 (Digital Marketing Expo & Conference), the leading trade fair for the digital industry, will once again attract thousands of visitors from all over the world to Cologne, Germany in September. And as in previous years, Akeneo will be there in full force! Continue reading “Akeneo at #DMEXCO19: Explore — Inspire — Discover!”

Q: What are the key questions your customers typically ask when evaluating a systems integrator? The best systems integrator is the one who can deliver real business value, effectively design the technology solution to map to the business needs, and whose experience closely matches the specific requirements of the customer’s project.   To that end, customers should ask:

• How does the integrator align with my business drivers and pain points consistently throughout the effort?
• Does the integrator have extensive experience in your industry?  Do you have examples or use cases we can review?
• Does the integrator have expertise in data and digital strategy, demonstrate thought leadership and offer strategic consulting?
• Does the integrator have dedicated consultants on the team with project management experience and knowledge of all the latest technologies, trends, and best practices?
• Has the integrator worked with companies of a similar fit? Examples may include: companies with a similar level of integration complexity, those with data sourced from external vendors/suppliers, or those with a geographically dispersed user base.
• Is the integrator an organizationally and financially stable company?
• Does the integrator provide post-implementation services and support?

Q: At what point does a systems integrator get involved, and how can the systems integrator help Akeneo with sales process? A:  A systems integrator such as Infoverity can enter at various times in the cycle. Sometimes systems integrators get involved very early in the sales cycle, particularly if the client is in need of guidance around solution best practices, business process, change management or project delivery/phasing approach. This could take the form of an early discovery phase to help frame the program. Alternatively, the client may desire a more formal and in-depth strategy and roadmap exercise to lay out a longer-term vision for the data and systems landscape and evolution. The system integrator being evaluated should have significant experience to support the strategic needs of the specific client. Other times an integrator comes in to support the RFI/RFP process. We work directly with a vendor like Akeneo to complement the technical tool capabilities and cost responses with a solution methodology for project planning, execution and post go-live hypercare or extended production support. Finally, an integrator may be brought in after the vendor/software has already been selected and the client is seeking a partner for program strategy and/or implementation. We certainly prefer to be involved as early as possible, in order to gain a deeper understanding of the specific use cases that are being addressed in the initial phase. Plus, we need to understand the longer-term vision, to ensure the first phase establishes a solid foundation to build upon. Q: What are the typical business challenges faced by companies seeking a PIM/PXM or data governance solution? A: The typical business challenges include the need to:

1. Evolve their web presence to deliver an enhanced customer experience, beyond a transactional commerce focus
2. Create an intuitive, clean interface for data management, product categorization, and copy editing
3. Provide a clean, consistent, easily-searchable product catalog
4. Customize the catalog to the customer segment – geography, role/purpose (B2B distributor versus the B2C consumer), branding, product offerings by market

And for Data Governance I would also include data quality. The major challenge is in getting complete, accurate and timely data to drive the digital experience. As much effort that goes into creating an intuitive, seamless site experience should also be spent in the authoring and enrichment of the data that serves as the bedrock for successful customer experiences. Product information authored by multiple product lines or geographically-oriented teams can often follow their own standards (or none), and make data aggregation more challenging. We partner with the client to drive governance and quality processes as early in the product data life-cycle to more easily support the desired customer experience. Q: Are there industry or regulatory standards that must be supported? Can you give an example of something that has become more of a challenge for integrators over time, due to the evolving nature of PIM/PXM implementations? A:  Yes, and a quality systems integrator will understand the standards that must be supported. They will have policies and procedures in place to help guarantee adherence to these tenets, and design and implement solutions and systems that comply with them. Some examples include:

• EPA/regulatory requirements for companies with consumer products that have safety regulations
• Ingredient labeling requirements (e.g. for beer companies)
• EPA manufacturing requirements (e.g. for nail polish, detergent, etc)
• Appliance consumer-testing and safety-labeling data
• eCl@ss, a cross-industry product data standard for classification and description of products and services, emphasizing compliance with ISO/IEC industry standards, both nationally and internationally.
• ETIM, a worldwide uniform classification for technical products attributes or “features” that are needed for a product with a given classification.

Maintaining industry standard categorization/classification is critical to driving customer experience. Q: As a systems integrator, what tendencies is Infoverity seeing in the PIM/PXM market recently? A: Clients are emphasizing the digital customer experience, and the need to ensure consistent brand experiences across channels, geographies, and sites. Digital marketing needs are also evolving, due to data-driven consumer demands and insights on buying behaviors. All of this is increasing the pressure to provide all the information to the fingertips of the consumer to support their buying decisions and create loyalty. Having a comprehensive data strategy to acquire, enrich and utilize product data is being seen as a foundational component to power the digital customer experience now and in the future. About Infoverity Founded in 2011, Infoverity is a leading systems integrator and global professional services firm that provides MDM and PIM Strategy and Implementation, Data Governance and Analytics, Content Management, Data Integration, Enterprise Hosting and Managed Services that help large enterprises in the retail, consumer goods, manufacturing, financial and healthcare sectors to simplify and maximize the value of their information. Infoverity, a 100% employee-owned company, is on the Inc. 5000, is recognized by IDG’s Computerworld as one of the Best Places to Work in IT, as a Wonderful Workplace for Young Professionals and as a Best Place to Work by Business First.  Infoverity’s global headquarters is in Dublin, Ohio, the EMEA headquarters and Global Development Center is in Valencia, Spain and additional offices are located in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Norway and Russia.  For more information on Infoverity solutions, visit Infoverity.com, follow @Infoverity on Twitter, or contact us today.  

Rumors of the demise of industrial manufacturing may have been greatly exaggerated. While anyone who’s listened to media reports in recent years has heard tales of vanishing industrial manufacturing jobs, particularly in developed economies in areas like North America and Europe, the space still drives massive amounts of revenue. In the United States alone, industrial manufacturing produced $2.33 trillion last year, good for more than 10 percent of the U.S.’ economic output, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and account for half of U.S. exports. But while there’s no shortage of rewards for companies in the space, challenges abound. Industrial manufacturers have a long list of hurdles they need to clear before they can find success. Large product catalogs and massive internal teams often mean these companies struggle with digitization and eCommerce efforts, tend to manage product data in ERP and PLM systems, and lack a logical place to manage marketing product data. What’s more, these companies typically exchange data regarding highly technical products in very specific formats. Fortunately for industrial manufacturers, Product Information Management (PIM) and Product Experience Management (PXM) solutions can help them clear these hurdles. PIM and PXM are designed to enable manufacturers to more efficiently and easily manage large product catalogs and prepare for a successful transformation to eCommerce. As a result, industrial manufacturers typically report increased conversion, reduced returns, and significantly increased marketer productivity after adopting PIM. But how do PIM and PXM help you and your company solve these industrial manufacturing challenges? Allow us to explain.

Go digital

One of the biggest sore spots for industrial manufacturers when it comes to digitization arises when the company decides to open up a digital commerce channel. While omnichannel commerce can have serious advantages for those who do it right, adding new channels can be particularly challenging for industrial manufacturers. The typically massive size of their product catalogs, for instance, often means extra time and effort when it comes time to update product information online or add a new channel. Making matters more difficult, these catalogs are typically filled with highly technical products, which require even more commitment and management. PIM and PXM, however, can make the enrichment process far easier. By using business rules engines and validation workflows, for example, you can easily eliminate tedious, repetitive tasks and ensure that only accurate, consistent, and contextual product information is presented to customers.

Scale sustainably

Simply enriching your catalog once is not enough, however. Product information also needs to be frequently updated to reflect changes in a product, better fit a new platform. Making these updates and changes can be just as daunting as initially enriching information, however. What’s more, as new products are added to existing catalogs, these larger catalogs are typically more difficult to manage efficiently and effectively, and the challenges grow even greater when dealing with the kind of highly specific and technical data that industrial manufacturers typically handle. By using PIM and PXM solutions, however, industrial manufacturers can transition to digital commerce successfully and sustainably. The scalable, flexible structure of PIM, paired with a visual enrichment interface designed for marketers and other tools and capabilities, allows your company to make updates and changes to product catalogs easily and efficiently.

Efficiently handle industry data formats and govern data

It’s not just the highly technical nature of product data that can cause industrial manufacturers to struggle with product information management, however. This data is also typically expressed and exchanged in unusual, highly specific formats. These formats do offer advantages to industrial manufacturers, such as better communication between suppliers and distributors, reduced costs, and accelerated time-to-market. However, they can also make it harder to manage product information and assets for omnichannel commerce. PIM and PXM, however, are specifically designed to manage data in these unusual formats. This will help your team more efficiently and easily manage product data and descriptions. What’s more, PIM can also help your team more efficiently and easily implement data government and management processes and procedures. Use your PIM to identify missing or incorrect data, establish governance policies, fix and correct incorrect or low-quality data, and maintain and update your data governance plan to ensure your customers are only given accurate, compelling, and consistent product information.

Integrate seamlessly

Efficiently handling data is only half the battle, however. In an information-heavy space like industrial manufacturing, your company also need to be able to seamlessly communicate and manage data across multiple data management tools and systems, including DAMs, ERPs, and more. It may sound simple, but managing your product information and specifications across all of the different data systems you have is often easier said than done. Fortunately, PIM can help your team simplify data management by integrating disparate systems and tools via our network of open-source connectors. This will help prevent errors or inconsistency in product data and help your team work faster and more efficiently. 

Boost productivity

In the digital age, speed is king. Your team needs to be able to move quickly, getting products to market as fast as possible, in order to keep up with ever-evolving customer trends and demands. Akeneo PIM speeds the product information management and new product introduction process so you can get your products to market faster — across all channels and regions — with a range of features designed to boost productivity. These include automation features, which help remove repetitive, tedious tasks from your team’s plates, validation features, which can ensure that enriched product information is approved and updated as soon as possible, and completeness features, which structure your team’s workflow across channels and locales, allowing them to focus on what matters most and become more productive in the process. Use PIM features like automation, validation, and workflow controls to eliminate unnecessary and repetitive tasks. That way you can manufacture and sell more products, more quickly, boosting revenue and improving relationships along the way.

Conquer Industrial Manufacturing Challenges

It isn’t easy to be an industrial manufacturer these days — but PIM and PXM can help. By using product information and product experience management solutions to enrich and manage your product data, your team can expand to new channels and locales more efficiently, handle industry-specific data formats with ease, and boost their productivity. Solve your problems with PIM! Discover how Product Information Management and Product Experience Management can help you conquer common industry challenges by registering for a demo! Want to learn more about the basics of PIM? Download our eBook Product Information Management 101 today!

But while expansion can lead to increased revenue thanks to the addition of new customers in these faraway markets, it’s also a stressful time for many brands and retailers and brings with it a huge amount of tedious and time-consuming new work. This is largely a product of just how much needs to be done in order to make these efforts successful. Product descriptions must be translated into local languages, multimedia assets like photos and videos must be made relevant and appropriate for new markets, sizes and measurements must be converted into the correct weight, and prices and taxes must be updated to meet new standards and regulations — and all that is just the beginning.

Expanding to new markets is often easier said than done

It’s enough to turn any expansion effort into a months-long marathon of complications, confusion, and pain. Unless, of course, you’re expanding with help from product information management (PIM). Akeneo PIM can help your company more easily expand to new markets by improving translation and localization processes, giving you product information that will make buyers in any market take notice of your offerings — and make a purchase. That’s critical, because brands and retailers who miss the mark on translation and localization often see their expansion efforts fall flat as they struggle to connect with new customers.   Don’t believe us? See how improving translation and localization with PIM can help your next expansion effort succeed with ease.

Talk the talk

The first, and perhaps most obvious step in expanding to a new market is translating product information into the local language. But this step isn’t as simple as it may seem. But it’s not enough to simply plug product descriptions or data into a translating software and call it a day. You also need to localize these descriptions in order to ensure that the content aligns with local dialects, norms, and slang. Expanding to new markets and tailoring product data is also a numbers game. European companies expanding to the United States, for instance, must ensure that they convert all measurements and numbers to local units. That means converting clothing sizes to their American equivalent, making sure that all measurements are expressed in yards, feet, and inches rather than meters, centimeters, and millimeters, and even converting prices from the Euro to the U.S. dollar. No matter what country they’re in, shoppers expect to do business in their native language, using measurements they understand and pay in their local currency. If you don’t give them these capabilities, they’ll simply find another seller who can.

55% of surveyed customers buy only from merchants who present product information in their native language.

Go global, stay local

Language differences are just the start of the subtle differences in product information expanding brands and retailers must master in order to find success. There’s no shortage to the amount of information that must be adapted when a company crosses borders — even something as similar as color can complicate expansion. In many countries, for example, purple is associated with royalty or nobility — but in Thailand, violet is more associated with death and mourning than the upper class. Getting these cultural differences wrong can result in disaster for expanding enterprises. And just like with translation and conversion, localization affects more than just words on a page. Marketing teams must also ensure that product images are relevant and appropriate for new markets and that measurements are expressed in a way that would make sense to a local. If these assets aren’t relevant to customers, they’ll likely move on to another merchant that’s willing to show them exactly how this product fits into their climate, region, and lifestyle.

56% of buyers say that finding product information in their native language is a bigger factor in their purchasing decision than price

Stay on the right side of the law

Customers aren’t the only group that your company has to please when selling cross-border, however. Expanding to new markets means complying with a host of new regulations, from tax codes and country of origin rules to labeling regulations and health statues. Take the European Union — when companies first start selling in the EU, they have to comply with some of the most stringent regulations in the world. These rules govern how products in seemingly category, including electronics, toys, textiles, and more, are made, labeled, and sold. What’s more, companies must also now contend with data privacy protections like GDPR. If your business finds itself on the wrong side of these laws, they could be fined, or see their products held or seized at customs, costing both time and money. Certain industries have even more regulations to worry about. Brands and retailers working in industries such as healthcare and pharmaceuticals, banking and financial services, and food and beverage are more highly regulated than many others, meaning that they must deal with even more changes to product data.

33% of firms say that complying with local laws and regulations is their biggest challenge in international commerce

How PIM can help

There’s clearly no shortage of product information challenges to contend with when expanding across borders. From simple language translation and unit conversion to more precise localization and even complying with the local rules and regulations, these roadblocks can slow down expansion efforts or cause brands and retailers to struggle in new markets. This is what makes it so imperative to ensure that product information is comprehensive, relevant, and accessible — and why expanding businesses would be wise to invest in product information management. By using PIM solutions to expand and enter new markets, your business can cut down time to market by as much as 300 percent, boost sales by 400 percent, and reduce returns, all while making your marketers more productive. Go global while staying local. Contact us get your PIM project underway, download our eBook Product Information Management 101 to learn more about how PIM can help your business, or check out our blog Winning the Battle of the Brands to find out how to make sure you stay on top of the competition.

Many retailers have told researchers that they have experienced a notable increase in the number of product returns, particularly among digital shoppers, with returns costing sellers more than $600 billion around the world each year. What’s more, in a report released late last year, more than half of surveyed merchants described returns as a problem that “has a negative impact on the day-to-day running of their business.” Some of this ever-increasing return volume can simply be chalked up to buyer behavior, including customers who buy expensive items to use them once before returning them, those that buy several products at once so they can see what color or size works best for them, returning the rest. But according to many analysts, the vast majority of returns — nearly two-thirds, in fact — are the result of mistakes made by retailers. These mistakes can often be as simple as delivering the wrong product, or a product being damaged during the manufacturing or shipping process, and can be fixed by simply replacing the product with the proper version. But in many cases, these returns are the result of bad and inaccurate product descriptions or assets, which leave shoppers with the wrong impression or idea of what they purchased.

So how can your business avoid falling victim to product returns caused by bad product depiction?

The answer lies in Product Information Management (PIM) and Product Experience Management (PXM) solutions. These solutions help you optimize your product data and assets, including descriptions, images, and technical details, ensuring that the content consumers find is consistent, compelling, and most important of all, accurate, thereby reducing the amount of customers who return products to bad product depiction. Enriching product information and assets with PIM and PXM can help your business see real reductions in return rates. PIM users have reported a 40% decrease in product returns, thanks to features such as automated enrichment rules, product completeness monitoring, and validation, which each work to ensure that shoppers are more informed prior to purchase.

Let’s take a closer look at the ways these features can lead to a reduction in product returns.

Automated enrichment rules

Accurately and compellingly completing and enriching product information can be a daunting task, especially for distributors, big-box retailers, fashion companies, and others with a large, varied, or constantly changing product assortment. Whether you have 1,000 products or 1,000,000 PIM and PXM can help you reduce confusion among customers using automated features. These tools can help your team more accurately and consistently enrich product information while also reducing and even removing tedious and repetitive work from marketers’ to-do lists, leaving them free to focus on crafting accurate and compelling content. By using automated business rules to standardize and enrich data, for example, you can improve the quality and accuracy of your product information by removing human error, as well as expediting the enrichment process. Automated features can also help you manage product data in bulk, which can help your team more easily create product collections and ensure that matching products will be grouped together.

By adding automation to your enrichment workflow, you can reduce errors in product descriptions and data while giving your team more time to craft compelling descriptions

Product Completeness

Inaccurate product data or descriptions are a major reason for product returns — but so is incomplete information. If you don’t allow customers to easily find all the images, video, measurements, and other product details and data, they are more likely to return the product after receiving it. PIM and PXM, however, can prevent incomplete product information from reaching your customers using product completeness features. These tools provide information about product enrichment quality and help ensure that all of your product attributes have been enriched before a product can be added to your online store or other channels. Product completeness features can also help your team with their workflow across channels and locales and is the basis of productivity tools like Projects and Views. What’s more, they can be particularly powerful tools in building data governance policies that ensure that future product imports and enrichments are accurate and use high-quality product descriptions and data.

Use completeness features to make sure the product information you provide to customers is complete and consistent, putting an end to customer confusion.

Validation

Even after your products have been enriched using automated features and descriptions and data have been completed, there remains a small chance that product information could be inaccurate in one way or another. After all, no one is perfect — not even your marketing team. Errors are part of human nature, and some big and small mistakes are bound to crop up along the enrichment process. Even if these mistakes are miniscule, however, their effects can be massive. If they lead a customer to purchase a product they otherwise would not have, eventually necessitating a return, it can cost companies more than just the cost of the purchase — it could also drive the customer away for good. To prevent these mistakes in product data and descriptions to slip through the cracks, a good PIM or PXM solution will offer validation features. These features allow managers or other members of your team to easily verify both the accuracy of individual contributions to product data and the overall completeness of that data.

Errors are unavoidable — what matters is catching them before you publish. Use validation features to ensure product information is complete and correct.

Reduce returns by 40% with PIM and PXM Product returns are a disaster for brands and retailers — but most are preventable. By using PIM and PXM features like automated enrichment rules, validation, and product completeness, your team can improve the quality, accuracy, and consistency of your product information. This can help your business reduce returns by as much as 40% and increase customer trust in the process. Get rid of returns with PIM and PXM! Contact us to learn how Product Information Management and Product Experience Management can help you make sure that customers keep the products they’ve purchased, or download our eBook, Product Information Management 101.

Instagram is far from an anomaly, of course. The social network’s parent company, Facebook, already offers eCommerce capabilities, as does fellow social networking app Snapchat. These new social media-driven sales efforts are just the latest in what has been an explosion of sales channels in recent years. Decades ago, merchants needed to worry about just a single channel (their physical store) but now exist in an omnichannel world, selling products everywhere from brick-and-mortar buildings to virtual reality apps. While omnichannel commerce can present new complications and concerns to brands and retailers, it also presents a massive opportunity for success. According to recently released research, adding a single channel can boost a brand or retailer’s revenue by as much as 38 percent, while adding two channels can lead to growth of 120 percent, and adding three can result in an increase of nearly 200 percent. But simply starting sales on a new commerce channel doesn’t guarantee that revenue is about to come pouring in. Brands and retailers that do decide to widen their offerings need to make sure that their products and their team are ready to make their debut on new channels. Here are a few tips to make sure your omnichannel efforts bring an increase in revenue: 1. Use PIM to standardize, correct, and enrich product information No matter what channel you’re selling on, product information is crucial for success in the online age. When they decide they need (or simply want) to make a purchase, customers typically take to search engines like Google to find the object of their desire. But if your product information isn’t readily available, search engines won’t be able to find your products — meaning that customers won’t be able to find them either. That product information also needs to be highly consistent and accurate — most customers won’t purchase a product they aren’t sure suits their needs, nor will they buy if product information is missing — and emotionally resonant, if you want to turn shoppers from browsers to buyers. Add it all up, and product information becomes crucial to any omnichannel sales effort. By using a PIM solution to manage your product catalog, you can ensure that your product information is accurate, consistent, emotionally compelling, and ready for its omnichannel debut. 2. Tailor product information to your new channel Just like snowflakes, no two channels are alike. Each has its own unique properties and requirements for merchants selling their products. On social media, for instance, showcasing images can improve the conversion rate on a product. Marketplaces, meanwhile, bring their own challenges. For example, marketplaces like Amazon have specific product listing requirements, meaning you may not be able to provide the same emotional context or experiences as your own website. As Akeneo CEO Fred de Gombert explained at this year’s Akeneo PIM Summit, “there’s no one experience to rule them all.” Each channel requires a unique and tailored experience in order to resonate with customers, so make sure your new store is built to take advantage of the differences between each channel. 3. Take advantage of channel complementarity Once you’ve optimized product information and gotten your new sales channels off the ground, make sure they’re working together to drive sales. You can do so by embracing the complementary nature of omnichannel marketing and sales. Take global retailer Walgreens, for example. The company has engineered its omnichannel experience to take advantage of each channel’s advantages and capabilities and uses them to improve the experience across the board. Pharmacy customers, for example, can use the company’s mobile app to order a refill for prescriptions, then present their mobile device at the register to pick up their medication. By providing valuable product data and information to both customers and employees along every step of the journey, your various sales channels can help fuel increased offline and online sales alike. Get ready to go omnichannel There’s clearly no shortage of potential rewards for brands and retailers who embrace omnichannel selling — that is, if their product information is managed and enriched properly. To make sure your company is ready to go omnichannel, make sure your product information is accurate, consistent, and emotionally compelling. Then, tailor that data to the properties and requirements of your new channels, and take advantage of omnichannel complementarity. That way, whether it’s a new Instagram account or the latest addition to Amazon, you can ensure your new channel becomes a successful one. Go omnichannel! Contact us to learn more about PIM, get started by downloading our eBook Product Information Management 101 or find out how to triumph over your omnichannel competition with Fred de Gombert’s speech at APS 2019.

In the digital age, customers crave information. The constant connectivity offered by the internet and mobile devices gives buyers an endless opportunity to educate themselves and scrutinize every facet of a product or service before they make a purchase.

This new era of information means that brands and retailers are finding their products are under the microscope of consumers 24 hours a day. But, what happens if that information is wrong?

Providing customers with accurate and compelling information is the most fundamental purpose of Product Information Management software. The data that makes up this information is what informs your customers about your product, and has a significant impact on their decision to purchase. If you provide them with incomplete or inaccurate information it can heavily weigh this decision against you and result in a lost sale. However, if you are able to provide them with a product experience that’s error-free, comprehensive, and compelling, you can eliminate these lost sales, differentiate yourself from the competition, and even secure additional sales.

Reaching this next level product experience requires a foundation of high-quality data, which itself requires a proper data governance policy. Today we’ll explore how you can provide your customers with this high-quality data as part of your PIM implementation.

Correcting poor data and establishing governance can be an overwhelming task. It’s not uncommon for enterprises to have significant issues with their data for a variety of reasons. This could include multiple acquisitions or divestitures, application upgrades, rapid expansion, or a general lack of emphasis on data governance around their product information.

Fortunately, PIM is here to help.

A PIM project provides the ideal opportunity to implement data governance and cleanse your data.

During a PIM implementation, the cross-functional teams and technical resources needed to fix your data issues are already invested in the project. It’s just a matter of making data governance a priority.

Admittedly, this is often easier said than done, as PIM projects are often implemented as part of a larger eCommerce project, in which time and resource restrictions are a factor. A common scenario we see in Akeneo projects is the integrator or customer deciding early on to just move their ERP data directly into the PIM, without any cleansing effort. This is usually because the integrator or customer is more concerned about tangible deliverables related to connectors, customizations, or migration into the eCommerce platform, and cleansing, unfortunately, becomes an obvious place to cut corners. This is a mistake and means that while your product team may be using a fancy new tool, customers will still be seeing the same inaccurate data they saw before the project.

So, as you implement your PIM project, how can you establish proper data governance? Below are some key steps that must be considered in any PIM project to make sure you’re providing your customers with the best product information possible:

1. Identify the missing or incorrect data

Before you can improve your data you must first identify what information is missing or incorrect. This may  seem easy and obvious, but can be more difficult than it appears, particularly for larger catalogs with millions of lines of product information data. Product marketers — or as we call them at Akeneo, “Julias” — are often the most valuable in uncovering bad data, as they have the most intimate knowledge of each product and product attribute. Your Julias can provide a fantastic starting point that your technical resources can then supplement. For example, Julia may know that there are multiple variations of a dimension attribute (3X5, 3 by 5, three by five, etc..). She can then inform a developer on the IT/Integrator team, who can quickly export the data and run queries to isolate the data and see all the possible variations.

2. Establish a governance policy

Once your data issues have been uncovered, you must determine what the correct data values are and establish policies to ensure consistency across your catalog. For example, in the dimension example provided above, the product team may sit down and collectively decide that they want the dimension value to be standardized as “3X5” across the entire catalog. Another example could be more focused on the business process itself —if Supplier A provides excellent product images while Supplier B provides poor low-resolution images, a policy could be enacted to retake all of Supplier B’s images, while automatically using all Supplier A images. Establishing these policies is vital to standardizing your data, and Akeneo PIM provides excellent tools to help with this process. The use of completeness and attribute options are particularly powerful tools in Akeneo that can be of great assistance in building these policies.

3. Fix the source of the problem

Once poor data has been identified, it’s time to fix the source of the problem. The product ecosystem can be complex, and fixing the source of the problem requires you to understand exactly where each piece of product information is coming from. There can be many different causes of the problem including poor supplier information, incorrectly mapped data coming from another system like an ERP, or even human error, like the inconsistent use of an attribute value across a product team. Resolving the issues will depend on the problem itself. A mapping issue will be resolved by the IT team, human error must be fixed by standardizing data entry processes, and external issues, like poor supplier information, could require escalation by the purchasing team.

4. Correct your existing data

After the source of the problem has been resolved (and you’re confident it will no longer create issues) you must update your existing catalog. A data migration (like when implementing Akeneo) provides the ideal opportunity to fix this data. Once your business team has identified all the data issues and determined the correct values, the IT/integrator team can programmatically correct large amounts of data before migrating into the new PIM.

5. Maintain and update your data governance

Product information is dynamic. New products and technologies are constantly being phased in and out, and your governance policy must be designed to accommodate every change. When you add a new product line you must review the new line’s product information and adapt your existing policies and procedures. This is necessary to ensure that you are continuing to only provide your customers with high-quality information. It’s also important to remove data that has become irrelevant. For example, if a brand no longer exists in your catalog we recommend you delete it from your systems. A large B2B or B2C enterprise selling hundreds of brands at a time could easily end up having dozens of outdated “ghost” brands in their systems after several years if they’re not actively cleansing them from their product catalog.

Clean and complete

Akeneo provides many features that help you cleanse product data and establish governance. The use of attribute options, metrics, prices, and custom and reference entities ensure that only correctly formatted and predetermined values make it to your customers’ eyes.

Completeness is another important Akeneo feature designed to ensure a product isn’t exported to your channels until all important product attributes are filled out. Completeness also helps the business team structure their workflow across channels and locales and is the basis of productivity tools like Projects and Views. The rules engines allow the automatic transformation of data by the PIM based on predetermined business rules, and Proposals are a validation workflow to ensure nothing falls through the cracks.

Finally, Akeneo has recently released a new tool known the Akeneo Onboarder. The Onboarder allows suppliers to interface directly with the retailer’s Akeneo environment and provide data in a predetermined format.

There are also options outside of Akeneo that can be used in conjunction with the PIM to help ensure data quality. Developers can write scripts and utilize regular expressions in their language of choice (PHP, Java, Ruby, Python, etc.) to parse relevant data and cleanse it based on pre-established business logic. Customers can also use more traditional means to fix their data issues, such as emailing or calling a supplier or other internal teams directly and requesting better data.

Iterate to Great

It’s important to remember that it may be unrealistic or even impossible to correct all of this information in a single effort. Instead, it’s best to take an iterative approach. A PIM implementation is a great opportunity to start the process; during this migration, you can focus on the most critical data issues and establish governance using Akeneo’s many available features in the PIM. Once live, you can then progressively work towards improving your data by assigning your product team small side projects around certain attributes or parts of the product catalog.

It’s easy to get caught up on the latest new technologies surrounding the ecommerce space, but it’s important to remember that these new technologies are ultimately just tools. A new tool may dazzle your customers with how it presents your products, but if there’s no effective data governance policy in place your customers will still be seeing the same inaccurate or missing information that could impact their purchase decision.

Interested in learning more about PIM? Check out Adam’s session at the 2019 Akeneo PIM Summit for more info, or download our PIM 101 eBook.

 

 

According to recently released research, 86 percent of buyers say they are willing to pay more for great customer experiences. In order to provide shoppers with these enhanced experiences, however, companies must make sure their product experiences are up to par. That means using a Product Information Management solution to serve as the foundation needed to control product information and a cornerstone of eCommerce and omnichannel operations. But there are plenty of PIM solutions on the market, and just like snowflakes, no two are exactly alike. Each platform has its own strengths, weaknesses and unique capabilities, making it crucial that you find a solution that can meet both your current and future needs. With that in mind, here are six of the most important features we think you should consider when selecting a PIM solution:

1. Integrate and Connect with Everything

Perhaps the most critical factor when selecting a  PIM is the solution’s ability to integrate with your current technical stack, as well as information resources you plan to implement down the road. If you can’t easily connect your PIM to your internal ERP system data, supplier’s product data, online storefronts, mobile apps, POS systems, print catalogs, or other systems, you’re missing out on some of the primary benefits of implementing a PIM solution in the first place. The best PIM software for your organization will include connectors that facilitate interoperability among your systems and streamline operations. What’s more, just like current interoperability offerings, the size and strength of a PIM’s existing ecosystem is a huge factor in the long-term viability of the solution. PIM systems are not one-off projects — they are constantly growing and evolving to support more connected systems and technologies. Finding a PIM with a healthy and substantial community of integrators, technical partners, and developers will help support your evolving, long-term efforts.

Some changes are unplanned, so pick a solution with a long list of supported systems.

2. Be Easy to Use

PIM shouldn’t only play nicely with your technical stack, but with your team as well. PIM is a system that you and your team, along with outside users, must adopt and use every day. Just like any other system within your organization, the best interfaces are those that are so intuitive they are nearly invisible, so look for a solution with an intuitive interface that doesn’t require your team to sit through hours of training. On the flip side, the sheer amount of product data alone can be overwhelming to face. Therefore, the best PIM interfaces will provide a clear path to managing and enriching products and give a clear overview of the entire product catalog’s status.

If your team feels like they need a separate product management tool for data enhancement, then your PIM has failed you.

3. Automate Repetitive Tasks

Do the PIM platforms you are considering simply provide a different place to enrich data and fill in missing fields, rather than give you dedicated features to improve product data? This is a table-stakes requirement. The best PIM software will also include features designed to automate and eliminate repetitive tasks and streamline processes. Find a solution that can do some of the work for you by performing bulk actions and tracking completeness before publishing and validating work. Automating manual, repetitive tasks frees up your team and lets them focus on value-add activities.

The best PIM software will optimize your product information management processes and unleash your team’s creativity.

4. Offer Customization

As we mentioned, your PIM needs to be both able to support your current processes and capable of changing to adapt to future processes including the structure of your catalog. The best solutions conform to the way you do things – not the other way around. This typically requires some customization in terms of importing, exporting, structuring and managing data as well as personalizing UIs — make sure your PIM offers these and other customization options before you make your investment.

A good PIM solution adapts to meet the needs and goals of your business and products — not the other way around.

5. Support cross-border commerce

If you do business in multiple countries and manage information in several languages,  you don’t want to have to duplicate everything just to translate and localize it. The best PIM software will accelerate your go to market and help you manage product data requirements including different metrics and cultural norms for your different locales, without a bunch of tedious manual work.

A good PIM will help you localize product information to speak your customer’s language.

6. Have Flexible Deployment Options

Do you want to be able to run your PIM in your own data center, or via the cloud? Depending on your own internal IT strategy, you may want a solution that can support a variety of options to transition as your landscape evolves. Here are a few of the most common deployment types:

• On-premises: The organization is responsible for deploying and maintaining all the applications and data on their own servers, as well as completing all required system maintenance. This provides maximum flexibility and control but requires the most IT resources.
• Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS): The application and associated data are hosted by a third party. This means that the organization still maintains these things, but the third-party handles the underlying infrastructure. This allows organizations to have a high level of customization, but doesn’t require as many IT resources on their end.
• Software-as-a-Service (SaaS): Everything from the application to infrastructure is maintained by the application vendor. This is the “easiest” deployment option, but offers less flexibility and customization.

Choose a PIM solution that keeps your deployment options open.

The Best PIM Software Will Continue to Evolve and Support Your Business

Ultimately, PIM is a critical component of and between other systems, whether technical interoperability or human processes. Your business will not remain the same forever, so as your technical infrastructure and processes evolve, so must your PIM. Find a solution that you can adapt to your evolving business from the start to help prevent serious headaches in the future. Interested in learning more about PIM? Download our complete eBook Product Information Management 101 for everything you need to know and for a guide on how to convince your key stakeholders that you need it.

Increasingly, industry experts and observers are preaching the importance of data and information management. Some describe data as the new oil, while others call it a new currency, and even more still settle for claiming it could change how companies of every shape and size operate. Managing all this product data, however, presents a challenge. The world of product data solutions is full of acronyms. As a result, it can be difficult to determine what each solution is actually designed to address. Here’s a breakdown of all the acronyms and how they compare to PIM (product information management):

Product Data Solution Comparison