Product information, clear and available for all channels

E-commerce to a higher level

The number of customers served by Dugros nationally and internationally has grown significantly in recent years. To provide these customers with good service, it is essential to take Dugros' e-commerce activities to a higher level. The renewal of the B2B e-commerce platform was already planned. This raised questions like: In which system is our product information currently stored? Who is responsible for product information? Is our data complete and good enough for all channels we want to be active on in the future?

As with many organisations, product information at Dugros was spread across different systems. It was also unclear who in the organisation should work on enriching new products at any given time. It proved to be a time-consuming task to bring all the correct information together and publish it properly to the various sales channels. It also often happened that products that were not yet fully enriched were still placed online. The added value of a Product Information Management (PIM) system: 'a single source of truth', was quickly recognised.

Akeneo Implementation

Based on Dugros' requirements in the field of product information, XSARUS advised implementing the Akeneo solution. Akeneo is a market-leading open source PIM solution with a robust set of options.

Before Akeneo could actually be implemented, several workshops were organized with Dugros employees to develop a good data model; The basis for a PIM implementation. The data model that was eventually drawn up could be quickly set up in Akeneo. All products from the Dugros catalogue are now classified into product families in the PIM system. For each product family, attributes can be determined separately. This is an important advantage for Dugros, because this way you can precisely set which attributes need to be filled in per product category and it is immediately clear if the data is complete.

Workflow: from reactive to proactive

In addition to a solid technical basis, a lot of attention was paid in the workshops to making the workflow simpler and clearer. End-users should especially enjoy enriching their products so there is time left to write beautiful product content. Where employees used to see on the webshop that product information was missing, they now see it in Akeneo in a timely manner. With the personalized dashboard, everyone knows exactly what he or she needs to do. Product information management from reactive to proactive. As it should be.

Links for more complete product information

Thanks to the connection with ERP, all already available product information is automatically loaded into Akeneo. Dugros employees enrich this in the user-friendly and clear interface of Akeneo with commercial information, SEO texts and images. Once the enrichment is complete, an export can be made of texts that need to be translated. The export is sent to a translation agency and can be imported directly into Akeneo after translation. A process that is facilitated and accelerated thanks to Akeneo. Dugros now has not only more product information, but also more complete product information.

Channels

Now that all product information is neatly and structured in Akeneo, Dugros' b2b channels are provided with correct, up-to-date, and enriched product information. Among others, the brand portals of Micmacbags, Enrico Benetti, Charm London and PE Florence are connected to Akeneo. Of course, the new Adobe Commerce b2b webshop developed by XSARUS is also seamlessly integrated. If more channels need to be added in the future, that is no problem. The advantages of a single central source for product information will only become more apparent in the future.

For channels that cannot or do not need to be directly linked to PIM, exports of certain product information can be made to Excel. In the case of Dugros, this is very useful, as some parties require an Excel file in a fixed format. Where this previously required many actions and thus a lot of time, it can now be easily and quickly retrieved from Akeneo with exports. A big gain in efficiency.

Completeness

One of the major benefits of placing a PIM system between ERP and webshop is that there is now, in addition to overview and structure, insight into the completeness of the product information. If certain information is missing from a product, it is immediately visible in the clear Akeneo portal. Incomplete product information being placed online is now a thing of the past.

More efficient working and faster time-to-market

The result is clear: all product information for the more than 6,500 products is now clearly structured and available for all Dugros' b2b sales channels, including insight into the completeness of that information. Thanks to Akeneo, Dugros employees can draw from a single source of product information. A source that is always up-to-date, so there's never any doubt about the current nature of the information. The quality of product information across all channels has been significantly improved, and because there is no longer any need to search for the correct information, productivity has greatly increased. In short: internal workflows have been greatly improved and new products are online faster. Win-win!