
The case of STARK
STARK has this far involved 100+ of their suppliers in their digital transformation.
PIM solutions are often islands far away from your core retail campaign process and therefore not adding any real value. At the end of the day, you are not making your money from structuring data.
Encode Supplier Portal and the associated data and asset management modules within the Encode solution enable you to integrate data maintenance and product lifecycle management into the core retail campaigning workflow and achieve great benefits of turning your product information management process into a commercially based and commercially focused process.
Easily let your suppliers update their own product information, make product lifecycle management easier, deliver digital assets and assign products in the specific campaigns where you have agreed to provide the space for them.
We call it Commercial Product Content Management.
Rather than having data sent to you from suppliers in different formats and at different times, wouldn’t you rather have them doing the work directly in your system? Of course, with full workflow control to ensure that your channels will not be fulfilled with unintended content, assets, or products.
With the Encode Supplier Portal, you can make the existing product data directly accessible to suppliers, and you can give them access rights to propose changes to “their” products. Then, you can review and approve or decline their changes, and with only a few clicks, have updated product information in your database – ready to publish to websites, catalogs, and other channels.
Let suppliers create new products or do maintenance on existing products
Let suppliers do product portfolio management
Centralize all communication from both internal and external stakeholders
Place the vital product lifecycle management process at the suppliers
Make it easier and more consistent for suppliers to warn about price adjustments for specific categories
Capture the reasons for price adjustment
Let suppliers install products directly into your various campaigns
Reduce time wasted on requesting and processing the same data over and over from the suppliers
Remove non-value adding steps from your product and data onboarding workflows
Communication is scattered across mailboxes and messaging tools internally at the retailer or at the supplier creating doubts and constituting a threat to your supply chain in case of people not being available
The struggle to get information from thousands of suppliers.
Supplier is requested to send Excel files with products and content for (the same) products over and over again creating unnecessary workload at both supplier and retailer.
Information about for how long a product is “living” and when it will be replaced by another is managed in separate workflows and communication formats such as Excel and email, and not integrated into any automated workflow management.
It is probably just 20-30 percent of your entire product range, which is creating 80+ % of your turnover. Yet focusing the data maintenance and enrichment resources on them can be tricky. Time could be spent on doing maintenance on long tail products, which are not fast moving and in the core assortment, and which therefore don’t need enrichment to the same level as the core assortment products.
Management of product families is managed in Excel and not centralized