The new solution provides a seamless way to collect product data from suppliers at scale
Akeneo, the Product Experience (PX) Company and leading provider of Product Information Management (PIM) solutions, today announced its newest product offering, Akeneo Supplier Data Manager: a simple, scalable, and collaborative way to collect product data from all suppliers. Supplier Data Manager is the next evolution of the Akeneo Onboarder solution, incorporating feedback from customers to better support the different ways in which retailers and distributors collect, enrich and import supplier-provided product information and assets.
The announcement of Supplier Data Manager comes on the heels of the company’s acquisition of Unifai, the market-leading artificial intelligence (AI) platform for data collection, cleansing, categorisation and enrichment pioneered by the industry’s leading experts in AI and machine learning (ML). The strategic acquisition is poised to revolutionise Akeneo’s Product Cloud offering, infusing intelligence and cutting-edge technology to further elevate PX for brands, manufacturers, retailers and distributors globally.
Supplier Data Manager helps solve many of the pain points felt by retailers, distributors, and suppliers. Without an efficient way to collect supplier-provided product data, product launches and content updates can be delayed, resulting in lost revenue. Even if a distributor or retailer manages to collect data from suppliers, these companies are finding themselves with massive spreadsheets full of low quality, unstructured data, resulting in frustrated employees and lackluster customer experiences. Ultimately, retailers and distributors struggle to effectively collaborate back and forth on product content needs, resulting in poor experiences among suppliers, retailers/distributors and customers.
Understanding these challenges and knowing that every relationship with a supplier is different, Supplier Data Manager provides two ways of collecting product data within a single, dedicated portal:
- Suppliers upload their files – suppliers drag-and-drop their product data so the retailers/distributors have everything centralised in one place and can more efficiently review and import into Akeneo PIM.
- Suppliers fill out templates – retailers/distributors set guidelines for products and attributes in a template that the suppliers download, fill out, and re-upload in the portal for easy import into Akeneo PIM.
In addition to product data, suppliers can also upload media files as well, which the retailer/distributor can convert into an asset with one easy click. Once the data is collected in Supplier Data Manager, the retailer or distributor user can easily map to their data structure and import into Akeneo PIM.
This new solution facilitates better collaboration between retailers/distributors and suppliers, ensures accurate and complete product data is shared efficiently, and increases the speed-to-market with faster access to updated information.
Depending on the challenges that each retailer or distributor faces, companies will be able to purchase Supplier Data Manager alongside Akeneo PIM to improve the way they collect product information and assets from suppliers. They now also have the option to add powerful AI/ML capabilities from Unifai, an Akeneo company, to supercharge their supplier data onboarding process and automate as much of the process as possible.
“Akeneo is one of the only Product Experience Management (PXM) solutions on the market that provides solutions for both brands/manufacturers and retailers/distributors which gives us a unique perspective on how those companies rely on each other to deliver product experiences,” said Kristin Naragon, Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer at Akeneo. “This is why we are so excited about our newly enhanced Akeneo Supplier Data Manager and Unifai capabilities to help our customers improve their collaboration across the product information supply chain.”
