The Client
The client is a leading Australian luxury department store offering high-quality fashion, beauty, and home products. Established in the 19th century, this iconic brand now operates 40+ stores across Australia and has earned the distinction of revolutionizing how Australians shop.
The Challenge
The client’s business operations were scattered across various outdated systems, each managing various aspects of their online web catalogs, products, and digital assets. This fragmented approach led to a lack of cohesion and consistency, making it difficult to streamline processes and ensure that all data and assets were up-to-date and accurately reflected across all platforms. The disparate systems, each with its own set of protocols and data formats, created significant challenges in efficiently integrating and managing the overall business operations.
Manual processes using macro-based Excel sheets, with no automation, to enrich product attributes were labour-intensive and prone to errors, leading to inaccurate or incomplete product information. This led to fragmented product information, miscommunication, and data discrepancies, hindering informed decision-making. In addition, the outdated, and inefficient legacy applications used for managing business rules for product classification on the e-commerce site further complicated the workflow.
The client experienced longer time-to-market cycles due to manual product data enrichment interventions involving multiple applications and manual processes, and the absence of centralized governance for product data resulted in slowed workflow and data quality issues. As a result, delays in product launches and updates affected the client’s competitiveness in the market.
The Solution
The client needed a technology partner to provide a comprehensive, integrated, and automated Product Information Management (PIM) solution to streamline business processes and enhance data accuracy. They ultimately selected Persistent due to its extensive experience in helping businesses achieve digital transformation.
To address the client’s challenges, we proposed a multifaceted solution designed to streamline the client’s business processes and enhance data accuracy. Persistent implemented IBM Product Master to create a centralized platform capable of mastering more than 6 million styles and SKUs, consolidating and managing the client’s extensive product portfolio in a cohesive and organized manner.
Persistent implemented more than 1,000 internal and external vendor/supplier workflows for better manageability. In addition, we integrated the solution with AWS S3 cloud storage to optimize image storage capacity for product visuals, providing a scalable and secure storage solution for the vast repository of images associated with the client’s product catalog.
To help the client with automation, Persistent implemented a configurable rules framework to flexibly and efficiently map products to web catalogs based on a core merchandise hierarchy or specific attribute values.
The Outcomes
With Persistent as its digitization partner, the client has witnessed a remarkable 60% reduction in lead time-to-market by enabling product data and asset enrichment processes with its enhanced PIM platform. This streamlined approach facilitated quicker dissemination of accurate and enriched product information across all channels, accelerating product launches and updates.
Additionally, the client saw a 50%-60% improvement in data quality and a reduction in manual efforts by process automation, which not only improved product information accuracy and completeness but provided enhanced operational efficiency and data consistency.
Furthermore, the transition to a PIM platform consolidated the functionalities of three vendor tools into a single integrated platform, leading to a 30%-40% TCO reduction. Implementing a PIM platform also provided the client with a comprehensive 360° view of its product catalog, allowing for better decision-making, improved communication, and consistency across all platforms.
Technologies Used
- IBM Product Master
- AWS
- Kafka
- REST API
- Angular JS 2
