After trying once again to locate a replacement for his Goupil time travel online, Ake and Julia figure their destiny is sealed. Ake is doomed to live out the remainder of his days in an unfamiliar, strange, and primitive time period, devoid of his family, friends, and any of his futuristic conveniences. Julia, meanwhile, has seemingly been sentenced to a lifetime of forced companionship with this strange acquaintance from a distant future decade who seemed to appear on the floor of her apartment out of thin air. But just as all seems lost, hope arrives in the form of a radio ad. Will Ake and Julia find the solution to their problem in seemingly the most unlikely of places? Get your product information and product experience ready for the future! Learn how PIM and PXM can help your team conquer these new sales channels with relative ease by reading our blog on Turning A New Commerce Channel Into A Success or get in touch today!

In last week’s edition, Ake and Julia turned to Goupil’s strangely-organized catalog and not-so-helpful customer service in hopes of finding the replacement time travel controller. However, instead of finally securing a new controller and sending Ake back home, the pair were only met with more product information problems. Now, as Julia continues to become more frustrated with her futuristic squatter, she recommends he turn to the internet’s one-stop-shop for 2019 consumers: Amazon. Surely, the online marketplace known for selling everything from A-to-Z will be able to provide a solution — or will it? Get your product information and product experience ready for the future! Learn how PIM and PXM can help your team conquer these new sales channels with relative ease by reading our blog on Turning A New Commerce Channel Into A Success or get in touch today!

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!”

On the last episode of The Goupil Experience, Ake and Julia turned to the wisdom of the crowd, hoping that social media could help Ake find a replacement Goupil time travel controller to return to his own time period. Unfortunately, the social experiment didn’t go as hoped. Instead of finding a controller, the pair found only frustration — and a healthy dose of internet conspiracy —  as consulting both the official Goupil page and Julia’s 2019 friends failed to produce the product they searched for. If you want a job done right, you have to do it yourself. They’ve got their hands on a Goupil catalog and are headed right to the source. They plan to call up the company directly so they can find a new controller for Ake and get him out of Julia’s hair. Check out our latest video to find out! Get your product information and product experience ready for the future! Learn how PIM and PXM can help your team conquer these new sales channels with relative ease by reading our blog on Turning A New Commerce Channel Into A Success or get in touch today!

Last time we left our friends Ake and Julia, Ake was desperately trying to find a replacement to his Goupil time travel controller so he can return to his home time period — but he’s having some difficulty. After initially hoping to find the object of his desire by communicating with a home shopping assistant, Ake discovered that Goupil’s product information was poorly referenced, leaving his voice assistant “Timmy” unable to locate the product he needed. In this latest episode of The Goupil Experience, we rejoin Ake and Julia as they turn to social media after failing to find the Goupil controller via voice assistant. Will the pair have more success by turning to Twitter and Facebook, or will they be lost in a web of poor product information and internet conspiracy theories? Check out our latest video to find out! Get your product information and product experience ready for the future! Learn how PIM and PXM can help your team conquer these new sales channels with relative ease by reading our blog on Turning A New Commerce Channel Into A Success or get in touch today!

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.  

  Commerce isn’t what it used to be. These days, it seems that all customers need to do to find and eventually purchase a product they want or need is to ask for it. “Alexa,” millions of shoppers can be heard saying, “show me…” While this constant connectivity offers plenty of opportunity to brands and retailers, it also presents a challenge. These companies need to make sure that consumers can easily find details on potential purchases — because if they don’t, consumers won’t be able to find their products on any of their devices — even if they’re from the future. Just ask Ake. As you can see in the video below, he desperately needs to find a replacement Goupil controller after his faulty futuristic device dumped him in our time period — decades earlier than his own. Now, he needs to search through a jungle of inconsistent, inaccurate, or just plain bad product information, along with the help of his friend Julia, if he wants to return home. Get your product information and product experience ready for the future! Learn how PIM and PXM can help your team conquer these new sales channels with relative ease by reading our blog on Turning A New Commerce Channel Into A Success or get in touch today!

Customers in the modern age crave information about products they are considering purchasing, particularly when the item in questions is especially important to this person’s day-to-day life or when prices are high. And while detailed product descriptions, accurate data and measurements, and even customer reviews can help your customers get a better understanding of your products, they often aren’t enough. Customers want to be able to see your products in action, being used in the same or similar manner to how they plan to use the item. Runners want to see other athletes jogging in your sneakers, fashionistas want to know how their latest look will go over in the real world, and even construction workers need to understand exactly how their materials will look on the job site. But you don’t have to take our word for it — take a look at these five stats that help demonstrate just how important visual product assets are to your omnichannel success — and stick around for tips on how to manage these crucial resources.

1. People typically remember just 10% of information they hear, but 65% of images they see

Let’s start with a big one — when it comes to retaining information, most humans are simply better at remembering images they saw than they are at storing words they read or heard. As we’ll discuss below, most humans are visual learners, and as a result, researchers believe that the average person retains 65% of visual image information as opposed to 10% of written or auditory info. Unlike the family dog, our sense of sight is far better than our sense of smell or hearing and is a crucial part of how we receive information from the world around us. As a result, the majority of us remember visual information well, and it has a big impact on what influences our thinking.

2. Video will account for 82% of internet usage by 2022

Maybe it’s because of our nature as visual learners, maybe it’s due to a shrinking attention span, or maybe it’s the result of another cause entirely, but there’s no debating that consumers and professionals alike are increasingly watching video when they log online. According to Cisco’s Visual Networking Index, video currently accounts for 75 percent of global IP traffic — a significant share to be sure, and one that has already seen a significant rise in recent years. But researchers predict that video consumption will continue it’s notable growth over the next few years, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 29 percent to reach 82 percent of all internet usage within just a few years.

3. Infographics lead to web traffic increase of up to 12%

Photographs and video aren’t the only visual assets that can help you communicate with customers, of course — they’re just the start. Infographics, for example, can help you communicate statistically dense or dry subjects in a fun, easy-to-understand way. What’s more, research shows that consumers like infographics — in fact, they like them so much that they’re more likely to interact with businesses that use them. According to research from OneSpot, infographics can improve web traffic by up to 12% — and for good reason. The average user reads just 20% of words presented on any given webpage, while 65% describe themselves as visual learners — a perfect audience to target with infographics.

4. Emails with “Video” in the subject line boost click-through rates by 65%

Email marketing has become an integral part of almost every company’s operations, and a crucial way of communicating with customers. There’s no better way to let your customers know about a new product, a special offer or promotion, or other brand news is to speak to them directly. But consumers are drowning in a veritable sea of spam emails these days (according to recently published research, nearly 270 billion emails are sent each and every day). That means it’s harder than ever to break through the noise and get consumers to click on, open, and read your message — but video can help. One study found that simply including a video in an email, and letting recipients know what’s waiting for them by using the word “video” in the subject line of that email — boosted open rates by 19% and increased clickthrough rates by 65%.

5. 72% of people would rather use video to learn about a product or service

We’ve saved perhaps the best example of the importance of visual assets for last. According to research, it seems that customers actually want to see more visual content from their favorite brands and retailers — 72 percent of customers in one recent survey said they would rather use images or video to learn about a new product or service, more than any other medium. What’s more, to a recent Hubspot survey of consumers in Colombia, Germany, Mexico, and the United States, more than half of consumers want to see more videos from brands and businesses they support. What’s more, other types of visual assets weren’t far behind — 41% of surveyed consumers said they want to see more images from these companies outranking both written articles and content delivered via PDF.

Give customers more of what they want with PIM

It’s clear that customers crave more visual assets, from infographics to product photos, and even and especially video. These multimedia assets help them better understand the products they’re considering purchasing and can help give them the confidence needed to complete the transaction. Product Information Management (PIM) solutions can help you take control over your visual assets and deliver a stunning and compelling omnichannel experience to your customers. Paint a better picture of your products with PIM! See how your team can use visual product assets like photo and video to take your omnichannel experience to the next level. Contact us get your PIM project underway, 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.

That’s especially true in the world of modern omnichannel commerce. Offering customers a compelling experience across the full range of channels available requires teams that are able to collaborate seamlessly — sharing data and expertise at the drop of a hat, working efficiently, and moving quickly to ensure that no time is wasted. eCommerce executives, marketing managers, studio supervisors, and every other member of your team needs to be working together arm-in-arm if your company is to reach its true potential. But while many may like to describe our modern, tech-influenced world as one that allows, even encourages, cross-functional collaboration, that isn’t always the case. Many data management systems leave product information trapped in silos, inaccessible to many employees who need this information to do their jobs effectively. Storing and managing product information in spreadsheets, for example, often makes it nearly impossible for all members of your team to access and manage data effectively and efficiently, leading to slower time-to-market and inaccuracies or inconsistencies in product data. Even worse, your team could end up wasting time, working on the same tasks in parallel. That’s why it’s essential that brands and retailers alike in the omnichannel age rely on dedicated Product Information Management, or PIM, solutions. Applications like Akeneo PIM help your team work together more efficiently by liberating data from spreadsheets and silos, improving access to the most important tool in your omnichannel arsenal: product information. Don’t believe us? Take a look for yourself at these three ways Akeneo PIM can help your team rise to the top of their field.

Stop Relying On Spreadsheets and Avoid Silos

Outdated and inefficient data management systems like spreadsheets, which leave product information trapped in silos and inaccessible to many employees, are the natural enemy of productivity. When using these solutions, companies are typically relying on the outdated model of going to market with new products in new channels where each project is managed in a separate environment, with a separate process, by separate contributors working in silos. In the old approach, efforts are duplicated, opportunities for errors are multiplied, and man-hours are wasted on repetitive tasks. These solutions almost always lead to slower time-to-market and more errors or inconsistencies in product information. Akeneo PIM, on the other hand, is designed to help you achieve organizational excellence by revolutionizing and optimizing the process of taking new products to market, managing a new collection or range of products and updating product details by providing one centralized, trusted source for product information. It does so by providing a single source of truth for product information and assets, improving the accessibility of product data and liberating it from the silo of spreadsheets.

Automate and Accelerate Workflows

Managing product data in outdated and inefficient tools like spreadsheets means that your product enrichment team must waste hours each and every day on repetitive, low-value tasks. This means they don’t spend their time — and your time — writing creative and compelling product descriptions, producing top-notch multimedia assets, and making sure your customers are greeted with a compelling experience. Instead, they spend it to copy and paste descriptions, categorizing new products, and other time-consuming, repetitive tasks. PIM takes these tasks off your to-do list by using a business rules engine to automatically populate attribute values that apply across many products and product models. It also helps you manage product data in bulk. This can lead to much higher quality data by removing human error, as well as expediting the enrichment process.  

Jumpstart Expansion

Opening a new sales channel or expanding to a new market can put a particular strain on data management systems. When your company expands, more team members need to access and manage product information and assets quickly and efficiently, or risk delaying the expansion and losing valuable revenue in the process. If your product data is managed inefficiently or trapped in spreadsheets and silos, your omnichannel or international expansion will likely progress at a snail’s pace. Translators won’t be able to adapt content or data into new languages and units quickly, product enrichment teams won’t be able to optimize information or assets to fit a new channel, and your time-to-market — and the success of your new endeavor — will lag as a result. What’s more, as our customer Tarkett discovered, expanding to a new locale without giving local employees a chance to take autonomy of the enrichment process can weaken morale and slow down your processes even further.   But with the automated workflow and data management features above, Akeneo PIM helps alleviate expansion headaches and sets your team up for success. By giving employees local autonomy over the enrichment process and direct access to the data, information, and assets they need to complete their tasks and execute your team’s expansion plans and automating time-consuming and repetitive tasks, your team can work more efficiently while also improving the accuracy and quality of your product information.

Liberate your data

Liberate your data! Discover how PIM can optimize your product information management process, free product data from silos, and boost your team’s productivity. Contact us get your PIM project underway, download our eBook Scaling eCommerce 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.

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!