This industrial distributor managed its product content and digital assets in a legacy catalog management system, and was looking to replace it with a modern PIM system to better support its digital marketing initiatives that included enhanced e-commerce and print publishing, and SEO rankings.

Challenge

Product data was structured poorly and was not rich enough for robust SEO or e-commerce. The integration between the legacy catalog management system, an AS400 based ERP (Magnatron), and the Magento website was complex and prevented timely publishing of product content on the website. User frustration, delayed product releases, and inability to scale the assortment were significant challenges. The company wanted the ability to advertise and sell (including via dropship) thousands of additional SKUs, as well as leverage rich e-content (product taxonomies, granular data, and digital assets) obtained from Affiliated Distributors (a purchasing group) e-Content initiative. It needed expert help to execute these digital initiatives.

Solution

StrikeTru recommended replacing the existing catalog management system with Akeneo PIM, a user friendly, robust, and flexible PIM system. It comes with PimGento, a connector that dramatically simplifies the task of synchronizing rich product content and digital assets stored in Akeneo with a Magento e-commerce website. StrikeTru worked closely with the company to develop and implement robust PIM data structures (based on Affiliated Distributor’s taxonomy) in Akeneo. StrikeTru helped enrich and migrate content and assets from the current systems into Akeneo, and configured PimGento to enable easy syndication of product content to the e-commerce website.

Result

The company has a more robust taxonomy provided by the AD industry e-content initiative, enriched content, and improved product content management and syndication capabilities. Internal resources can reliably update content, pricing, and availability information on its website, and do it more frequently than before. The company is currently expanding its product assortment aggressively, enriching SKUs from multiple vendors and industry e-Content sources, and advertising and selling more products online to help drive incremental sales.