But as we’ve learned over the course of the past few weeks, the story behind this refreshing aperitif is a study in delivering a great product experience. Did you miss any episodes of this epic tale? Perhaps a binge-watch is in order? Not to fear! We’ve compiled each of the four episodes of the Ziggy Cocktail Experience, so you can watch it on repeat to your heart’s content. Just click the play button below and you’ll be transported to that lovely tavern where the heroes of our story await. Take that, Netflix.

It’s all come down to this, our final episode in the Cocktail Experience(s) video series! Our heroine has discovered the vodka that’s used to create the wonderful Ziggy Cocktail, and learned about each step that goes into creating this compelling concoction. So what does the final chapter of the Cocktail Experience(s) have in store? Will our heroine Julia successfully acquire the secret recipe? What is the human connection that brings it all together? Or are there more people involved in creating the product experience that she has yet to meet? Can’t stand to wait another minute before finding out the end of the story of the Ziggy Cocktail? You don’t have to! Check out the finale below.

Welcome to episode 2 of our Cocktail Experience(s) video series! Our heroine Julia has had her first sip of that delicious Ziggy Cocktail, and now she’s desperate to find out exactly what the ingredients of this lovely libation are. There’s just one problem — the recipe is a closely guarded secret, protected by the close-knit and diverse family of professionals that produce it. And all of them have their own secret ingredients, processes, and innovations that contribute to the ingredients that make the cocktail a true experience. In episode 1, Julia declared how important it is to know what’s in the products we buy — she’s about to learn how meticulous attention to ingredient sourcing contributes to brand values, where every part of the process is crucial to success. So if you want to learn what ingredients are at the heart of the fabulous Ziggy cocktail, check out Episode 2 of the Ziggy Cocktail Experience below!

This year’s series is about the Ziggy Cocktail — the world’s most delicious drink, aptly named after the Akeneo company mascot! So, what goes into creating this potent potable? Julia, the heroine of our tale, has the same question on her mind — but the answer is harder to find than she might have hoped! While the drink is delicious, its lack of product information leaves her wanting more, and the other patrons at the bar don’t seem to be any better informed than she is… Check out Episode 1 of the Story of the Ziggy Cocktail below!

PIM has proven to be an important piece of technology that should be considered as a way to actually accelerate the pace of getting your eCommerce site up and running. Without it, organizations are left to manually acquire and prepare product information and transform it for use in the new eCommerce site and to external marketplaces.

With PIM, however, this process can be made to go much faster and delivers the added benefit of making managing product information as your catalogs adapt and evolve simpler and easier as time goes on. PIM can ultimately help you reduce return rates by up to 40%, reduce product enrichment costs by as much as 5x, and increase conversion rates by 400%.

A common concern we hear raised is “Our digital transformation project is moving fast and we’re worried about making the project longer if we include PIM.” So how long does it take to implement and deploy your PIM and start seeing some of these benefits and realizing a return on your investment? No two PIM projects are alike, but by using the right approach, it can lead to go-lives in less time than you think — in fact, you can be up and running in a matter of weeks!

The key to getting value rapidly is to take a “minimum viable product” implementation approach. Fortunately, Akeneo PIM supports this approach so you can deliver an initial, working solution rapidly, and still be able to evolve and grow the PIM to a “perfect” state over the longer term.

Integrate with ease

Another common concern we hear is about integrating PIM with your existing stack. How much extra effort is this going to add to my project?

Akeneo’s highly connected PIM is ready to fit perfectly into your existing tech arsenal. We offer fully documented APIs, and with our marketplace you can easily integrate Akeneo PIM by working with one of our more than 100 extensions and connectors to leading eCommerce platforms, print solutions, syndication tools, translation services, and more, all designed to simplify and speed integration. This saves you the costs and person-hours that are typically spent enriching product information without PIM and manually feeding complete product data to your sales channels.

Tips for a fast go-live: Think big, start small

Even the longest journeys start with a first step, so think big and start small, then iterate and evolve over time. You can have a vision for what you want the perfect PIM to be able to do, but you don’t need to design and build the ultimate PIM solution before you go-live. Adopt a good/better/best approach to help you design the simplest PIM possible, then add additional functionality as your business grows and your needs evolve.

That way, you can get your PIM project started quickly, provide accurate, consistent, and compelling product information and better product experiences for your customers, and scale sustainably with a fast and easy go-live process with minimal investment.

Get flexible

Maybe you think PIM is a nice-to-have tool in your arsenal, but not your must-have or go-to weapon in the omnichannel commerce war? Or perhaps you’re convinced that PIM is too complex to implement and adopt quickly?

Instead, you can adopt and implement PIM into your teams’ product information processes easily and efficiently, without wasting valuable energy, money, or time. By leveraging Akeneo PIM’s flexibility, and adaptability, you can allow your solution to grow and evolve alongside your business. The key is to select a solution that doesn’t force you to define the distant future up-front — as well have all seen, things can change rapidly.

Take care of your teams

Now more than ever, it’s important that your product enrichment team be able to efficiently and productively update product information in order to get your products to customers quickly.

But if your teams are relying on outdated or poorly suited solutions to manage product information they won’t be able to work efficiently to meet your current needs or change catalogs in the future. This is especially true for smaller, thinly spread, or fully remote teams, who are often also suffering from a lack of resources or support. Fortunately, there is an answer — use PIM to help your team react to changing demarket demands with ease and efficiency.

Look at the example of Midland Scientific. The company was able to train college students to successfully use the PIM to enrich products in a matter of weeks, and leverage Akeneo’s easy-to-understand user interface and short learning curve to help its team rapidly adopt the solution.

Check out the podcast below to hear a brief conversation about the MVP approach and some tips and advice on how to leverage this agile implementation methodology.

Ready to add an MVP to your team? Contact us and we’ll help ensure your PIM project gets off on the right foot!  https://open.spotify.com/episode/4NwV7lA5AK7RlsObwAE46U?si=Vz2FLQ1xRGeaViPFkvexvQ

Even in cases where there is ample supply, delivery times have increased significantly. Shipping times of weeks instead of a few days or overnight are now common. As a result, many sellers are searching for new suppliers, ideally with an eye to finding more local partners, in order to be more responsive should a similar situation arise again. For many retailers and distributors, adding product information from suppliers is a challenging process that typically involves everything from phone calls with your new supplier to emails exchanging information, and even swapping spreadsheets, burning valuable time and resources with each step. Sellers may have this cadence down with existing suppliers, but starting the process from scratch with new suppliers adds additional friction while you are trying to rapidly respond to shifting market demands and disrupted supply chains. What’s needed is a solution to tackle the issue of efficiently onboarding supplier product data. A solution that enables willing suppliers to provide their product information directly to you, the retailer/distributor, in the format you need, without having to go through the painful, time-consuming manual process of editing Excel sheets, copying and pasting data, and manually reviewing and approving their submissions. These manual processes can leave you with errors in product information, a slower time-to-market, and an inability to add new products to your product collection or modify your existing offerings. Akeneo PIM with Akeneo Onboarder can solve these issues. This solution makes it easier to collaborate with suppliers to add new products and improve product data quality, resulting in faster time-to-market.

Handling the long tail of suppliers

In a retailer’s or distributor’s ideal world, all suppliers would graciously offer the authoritative product information the sellers need to create great product experiences. But sometimes, suppliers just won’t play ball. The largest and most important suppliers you work with might often decline to collaborate directly with you — or they simply may be unable to, given their resources or whether they perceive a strategic relationship. A rule of thumb we often hear retailers and distributors quote is “20% of my suppliers are 80% of my business” — so what do you do about the other 80% of suppliers — the so-called “long tail”? The key to getting these suppliers to work with you is to make it as easy as possible for them to provide you with the information you need. So how do you make that happen?

Onboard supplier product data with ease

Akeneo PIM features integrated product data onboarding capabilities for suppliers via the Onboarder. This speeds up the process of collecting data from suppliers and makes it easier for them to provide product data directly to the seller. Myer, a leading Australian department store used Akeneo to devise an easier method for their hundreds of suppliers to upload product information and images. By informing suppliers about Myer’s exact requirements, both Myer and their suppliers were able to enjoy a more streamlined process and get products for sale much faster than before. Myer also gamified the process by giving suppliers a score and therefore an incentive to enhance data quality. You can read the Myer case study and hear more about it in the podcast below.

Accelerate time-to-market

Besides the need to find new suppliers, the current pandemic has also impacted available resources as some companies have been forced to make unplanned, unwanted cuts. If you don’t have enough people or other resources available to dedicate to manually acquire, enrich, and approve product data from suppliers, that’s just another reason to look for an integrated solution to share the work among your team and those of your suppliers. With a solution like Akeneo PIM and the Onboarder you get more done with less. Suppliers have a personalized online environment for creating, uploading, and enriching required product information requested by the retailer/distributor, who then reviews and approves the data. Once approved, the supplier’s product data is ready for further enrichment and then distribution to relevant sales channels. Akeneo customers like Petra have already seen the benefit of using PIM to accelerate time to market. The U.S.-based wholesale distributor of electronics uses Akeneo PIM to help their supplier managers oversee an average of 30 suppliers each, enriching a total of 33,000 products while accelerating time to market and improving product data quality. To hear more about this topic, check out our podcast where we discuss the challenges with today’s supply chain and how a product data onboarding solution can help to overcome them. Ready to say goodbye to supplier struggles and hello to accelerated time-to-market, high-quality product information, and top-notch product experiences? Then say hello to the Akeneo Onboarder! 

“When you’re finished changing, you’re finished.” Benjamin Franklin may not have had modern business in his mind when he first thought up those words, but the sentiment remains true to this day.

In modern commerce, constantly emerging new products and shifting customer demand means your product catalog and assortment are never finished. Whether it’s the current pandemic or just a change of seasons, your catalog is always shifting and changing to accommodate new needs and desires from your customers. That means you need to be able to rapidly pivot and update your catalog without allowing errors in product information to reach your customers, or inefficient, unproductive processes to burn time, money and other valuable resources, slowing your time-to-market.

That’s where Akeneo PIM comes in. It’s designed to help you adapt and update your product information, making sure you stay on top of quickly changing market trends. With the power of PIM, you can more easily and efficiently get new products to market, update catalog assortments for market or seasonal needs, and even add new categories to help you meet shifting market demands.

Keep your catalog current

What happens when products become obsolete, or demand for different products that didn’t exist one day does the next? You need to be able to easily and efficiently update catalogs with new products and product information. Manually updating catalogs with new product information can be time-consuming and difficult to accomplish quickly, especially if these market changes have left you with a smaller or more distributed team, as many companies are experiencing right now.

Akeneo PIM’s flexibility and adaptability help you quickly and easily update product assortments by adding or removing products from your catalog, adding new product attributes, and pushing updates to the relevant sales channels.

Turner Price, a foodservice wholesaler, originally looked to Akeneo PIM to ensure that ingredients and allergen information is 100% accurate. Since the advent of COVID-19 and closure of restaurants — their primary customer — Turner Price pivoted their business and in just over a week, modified their product catalog with additional information required to facilitate selling directly to consumers.

Reposition products and communicate your brand values

Another phenomenon we’ve seen during this pandemic is the rise of repositioning products for different uses, or simply offering new products that consumers are currently seeking. Examples we’ve seen include positioning a neck gaiter as a mask, and clothing brands who began making masks out of the material used in their shirts. With this shift comes the urgent need to update product descriptions, technical specs, digital assets, and more pieces of product information in order to adapt the product catalog.

Furthermore, with the uncertainty about what’s next, consumers have become more attentive to and focused on what products they purchase. Brand values have emerged as an important buying criterion (read more about how this has risen in importance in our new global B2B survey). Buyers and shoppers want to know where products are made, are they ethically produced or sourced, sustainable, cruelty-free, and so on. This new product attribute and reference information, including images and information about suppliers or materials used, now needs to appear in addition to the “traditional” information in your catalog.

Akeneo can help you rise to the occasion and keep customers in the know by easily and efficiently adding new attributes and rewriting descriptions in one central system and rapidly populate them to all sales channels in context. Akeneo customers like Made.com, for instance, have attracted attention and acclaim for using PIM to make information about brand values the centerpiece of their brand strategy.

Prepare for new selling paradigms

Another pandemic-induced phenomenon is the closure of retail outlets and the need to ship all items. If items aren’t available for shipping, some sellers are offering click-and-collect or BOPIS (buy online, pickup in store) with curbside pickup. This also has implications for product information in terms of accuracy and the systems where it needs to be shared.

The key is keeping your customers informed and aware of what’s happening with their purchase. That way, their expectations stay realistic, and your relationship with them stays intact. But providing accurate shipping time estimates means being able to easily find and communicate lots of different pieces of product information, including dimensions, weight, and assembly instructions. Without a dedicated solution to handle this information, errors and inconsistencies can abound, further hurting your relationship with customers.

Midwest U.S. farm supply store Rural King used Akeneo PIM as part of its buy online pick-up in store offer. By being able to efficiently collect and enrich the right product data to support the program, Rural King’s BOPIS program resulted in an increase in online sales as well as in-store foot traffic.

So, while we all hope for the pandemic to subside soon, Ben Franklin was right about change. Being prepared to handle change and rapidly adapt will serve us all well.

Want to learn more about how Akeneo PIM can help you adapt your product catalog with ease? Contact us and we’ll put you in touch with one of PIM experts! 

So earlier this year, Akeneo set out to find out just how important product information and customer experience are to B2B buyers in 2020. The answer? Very important. The Akeneo Global B2B Survey 2020 found that 90% of B2B organizations cite product information management as highly important or a top priority. We also discovered more information on the product information problems plaguing B2B businesses and analyzed these responses to find solutions to help you overcome these obstacles. So, if you’re ready to learn more about the power of product information management for your customer journey, download your copy of the Akeneo Global B2B Survey 2020: 5 Takeaways on the Rising Importance of Product Experience today to learn:

• Why product information is crucial to B2B businesses
• What challenges stand in the way of product experience excellence
• Akeneo’s top 5 recommendations to improve customer satisfaction with an optimized product experience

Read the eBook

Controlling costs is a major goal for businesses in good times and in bad. But when markets are unpredictable and the future of your business is in jeopardy, it’s more crucial than ever to keep expenses in check, and only invest in areas that can improve your results. This need to cut costs is particularly challenging when you’re also working to keep up with rapidly changing market demands and ensure your business continues to operate during these uncertain times. Many companies are taking rapid steps to reposition their business. Some are beginning to offer new products by changing their assortment. Others are seeking new suppliers to replace those who are shut down or located too far away for a timely delivery. Those who have not yet gone through a digital transformation to eCommerce are rapidly seeking to sell online. And according to a survey done last month by Gartner, 100% of CFOs are cutting costs while preserving budget for technology that can help their company survive the current crisis. It can be tempting to simply deploy an eCommerce platform to be able to sell online. But the only way to ensure customers will find your site, and to ensure they’ll have a good experience once they reach your new site, is to make sure your product information is complete and accurate. Without a tool to help, your teams will resort to manual efforts to collect, enrich, and deliver good product data. This can be even harder to do if current cost control measures have resulted in reduced staff. The good news? PIM streamlines the process, uses automation to replace manual work, and makes your remaining team members more efficient so you can get to market fast. And, with the rapid ROI from PIM, you can even begin putting money back into the business. PIM helps you deliver high-quality product information to each and every one of your channels easily and efficiently while helping you control product enrichment costs and deliver a significant return on investment. Akeneo PIM accomplishes all of this and more by offering you better flexibility and adaptability, giving you the power to enrich, add to, and edit your product catalog with ease. The results? Dramatically reduced costs for product enrichment and product information management, massive spikes in team collaboration and productivity, and rising sales. Let’s take a look at a few examples where PIM generates rapid, positive ROI.

Accelerate time-to-market and reduce enrichment costs

Product enrichment often takes a long time and demands a lot of resources — but market trends demand you be quick and agile enough to keep up with ever-changing customer behaviors. You can accelerate your time-to-market and conserve valuable budget and resources with PIM. Akeneo PIM allows you to easily and efficiently adapt your product catalog and product assortment, allowing you to respond to new and shifting market demands more quickly while reducing enrichment costs. Take the example of Akeneo customer Midland Scientific. The scientific instruments and lab equipment manufacturer was able to reduce the cost of product enrichment by 5 times — from $5/SKU to $1 SKU — and accelerate product catalog production speed by 50% after using Akeneo PIM to take control of their product information processes.

Expand to new channels and locales efficiently

Shifting market demands can also cause you to look to new channels or geographic markets to sell products. Expanding to a new locale, however, requires translation and localization of product information, a tedious, time-consuming, and resource-intensive task. Adding a new channel to your omnichannel offering isn’t exactly an easy process either — you’ll need to put your product content into the proper context for the new channel or marketplace you’re selling on. What’s more, remote teams often do not have access to the proper information they need to localize or contextualize product information, costing you even more time and money. But with Akeneo PIM, you can automate these manual tasks and processes, accelerating the expansion process and saving valuable resources in the process. You can also more easily and efficiently enable remote work and outsourcing, and provide automation and workflows to help smaller or scattered teams do more with less. Akeneo customer Pierce, for instance, was able to expand to new locales and ease translation management thanks to Akeneo PIM. Cox and Cox, meanwhile, is using Akeneo PIM to improve their product data enrichment processes, creating a more compelling experience for customers in the process as they work to increase sales by 20%.

Onboard suppliers with ease

If your supply chains are disrupted due to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic or other shifting market trends, you may need to add new manufacturers or distributors to your list of suppliers. But adding these new relationships can be time-consuming, and lead to delays in shipments to you and your customers, slowing down your time-to-market, increasing costs, and possibly losing valuable revenue. What’s more, a lack of resources can make it harder for you to add accurate, consistent, and compelling product information about your new suppliers’ offerings to your product catalog. But, with the Akeneo PIM and the Onboarder, you can easily and efficiently add new product information, even new products, to your catalog by working directly with your suppliers. This way, you get the information you need, in the format you need, when you need it, accelerating time-to-market and increasing sales. Just ask our customer Myer, a leading Australian department store used Akeneo to enable suppliers with an easier method for uploading product descriptions and assets, streamlining processes, and getting products to customers more quickly. Ready to cut costs and boost efficiency? Check out the podcast below to learn more about how Akeneo can help you get a notable return on your product information investment, or contact us today and we’ll you walk through our ROI calculator to show you the business case for PIM. 

 

That’s the situation that European omnichannel pharmacy Shopapotheke faced not long ago. The company’s outdated and self-built systems for managing product information systems weren’t able to support the company’s continued growth or expansion plans and threatened to undermine the progress already made. That is, until they adopted Akeneo PIM! Check out the video below as Pamela Kohl, Product Data Management Senior Manager at Shop Apotheke, explains how the company used Akeneo PIM to replace its self-built systems. The result? Healthy growth, better management of a diverse group of more than 500,000 products, improved translation and locale management, accelerated time-to-market, increased efficiency and team collaboration, and more.

Want more insights and best practices on the world of PXM? Check out our eBook, PXM for Dummies!