Akeneo Honors PXM Champions at Akeneo Unlock 2023

The winners were announced at Akeneo Unlock 2023, the PX World Conference, which was held on March 8-9 in Paris. Each recipient outlined in detail how Akeneo’s solutions aided in reaching their commerce goals and building exceptional product experiences that drive results.  

“We’re excited to celebrate this year’s PXM Champions, who have proven that prioritizing the product experience drives tangible business outcomes like increasing revenue and reducing returns,” said Kristin Naragon, Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer at Akeneo. “These companies’ focus on product experience strategies enabled them to scale their business by reducing manual labor while at the same time delivering more value for customers who expect rich, consistent and accurate product information wherever they browse and buy.”

The six award winners for this year are:

Accelerator Award
Kolmi Hopen, a manufacturer of single-use medical devices and personal protective equipment for the industrial and hygiene industries, received the Accelerator Award for utilizing product information as a growth lever, enabling the company to respond rapidly to a spike in demand following the Covid-19 crisis. In partnership with Easycom, Kolmi Hopen leveraged Akeneo Shared Catalogs to reduce dependence on Excel, ease the collaboration process among internal teams and external clients, reduce product data errors and duplications, and enhance productivity among employees. With 154 products, Kolmi Hopen has been able to build strong, personalized product experiences quickly with the use of Akeneo Shared Catalogs. 

Expansion Award
DELFINGEN, a leading global supplier in the automotive industry, secured the Expansion Award in recognition of the successful use of Akeneo PIM and Shared Catalogs to expand its business. These Akeneo solutions helped DELFINGEN centralize and streamline its product data management and improve cooperation and productivity across teams, which was crucial for the company to complete a merger with SCHLEMMER. DELFINGEN also launched a new online channel, www.schlemmer.it, with the help of Akeneo, to reach new audiences and address existing small customers more efficiently. This website significantly accelerated growth for the business as it allowed the company to improve customer experiences, increase sales, reduce internal costs, and even reduce its carbon footprint through digital invoices and automated processing of orders.

Global Award
FENDI, an Italian luxury fashion house, won the Global Award for leveraging Akeneo solutions to enrich and manage product information and translation flows worldwide. Led by Alpenite S.r.L., FENDI utilized Akeneo PIM and its direct integration with GlobalLink, to limit the manual workload for employees, reduce reliance on Excel and improve translation workflow, which was difficult prior because there was no integration with any service provider. Now, FENDI’s translation workflow is 2x faster and the enhanced enrichment workflow has enforced control on overall quality and decreased overhead time significantly. All steps in the workflow are now correctly defined, associated with the right owner, and well tracked, enabling seamless collaboration and visibility between different departments and the worldwide distributed digital team. These results can now support and power FENDI’s goal of expanding its business to the Middle East and Asia as well as other target markets that may arise in the future.       

Leadership Award
Arkema, a diversified chemical manufacturer, took home the Leadership Award for adopting Akeneo PIM as a cornerstone of its digital B2B customer experience and accelerating its overhaul of its websites. Arkema aims to become a pure player in specialty materials by 2024, offering sustainable solutions to customers’ challenges. But with a catalog of more than 90,000 products, with a high level of complexity, serving 58 countries, Arkema needed a centralized solution to create and generate data for new product lines and deliver targeted content on its sustainable approach. Led by CGI, Arkema implemented Akeneo PIM to deliver uniform, accurate, and compelling product experiences at a global level across all channels, allowing the company to sell products faster, better, and from anywhere. The implementation of Akeneo PIM resulted in better experiences for customers and business units, with time to market being 2x faster and its business becoming future-proofed. Additionally, by combining digital and highly targeted print communication on the whole portfolio, Arkema will be able to save approximately 2.5 million euros by freeing up 8,557 days of employee time.  

Experience Award
Smartphonehoesjes.nl, an international e-commerce retailer of accessories for mobile devices, secured the Experience Award for heightened interaction among customers through enhanced images on its product pages. Working closely with Calago, Smartphonehoesjes.nl was able to use Akeneo PIM to ensure that images were automatically connected to the correct products and ensure the images were locally relevant, which drastically improved the customer browsing and buying experience and allowed them to become more competitive against other retailers. This strategic improvement removed 15 hours a week of manual labor for a product management team of two. The team also saw a 10.2% increase in product conversion on its webshops, which highlights the importance of customers being able to browse accurate and relevant product images before purchase. 

Ambassador Honor
As part of the announcement, Akeneo also granted an Ambassador Honor to Bowens, a market leader in supplying the largest variety of quality timber and building supplies in Australia. Bowens’ new eCommerce coordinator, who was the only person managing the 35,000 products the company offers online, as well as its 220 suppliers, advocated for acquiring Akeneo solutions after using and loving them at her previous job. She was successful in this endeavor and Bowens was able to improve the product content quality online, increase the number of products online, get products listed online quicker, and allow suppliers to enrich content with ease, all thanks to leveraging Akeneo PIM and Akeneo Onboarder. Bowens now has a strategic advantage over competitors and as it more quickly grows its online store and its eCommerce customer journey.