Omni-channel catalog management and PIM for fashion retailers

Rethinking the digital catalog, centralizing it and standardizing access to it results in a surefire reduction in time to market and a consequent improvement of the customer journey in an omni-channel experience.

Lutech started out from this promise, which was then totally fulfilled, in its work with one of the major international leaders in luxury & fashion retail. Initially, the client used structured management of product information, different parallel seasons and promotional logic to be managed at different times depending on its countries of presence.

The client’s primary request was to improve update times and product catalog information. A number of additional benefits in terms of customer relationship would then derive from this.

When Lutech began the process of optimizing the brand’s digital catalog, there was no one single repository for product information. There was no master database allowing distribution of consistent and fast information across all sales channels.

The initial architecture was behind the fashion retailer’s main concerns regarding catalog management. In particular, the process of managing product information was laborious and costly in terms of time and resources, with significant delays in omni-channel time to market. Aggregating information from several separate systems involved a risk of errors and duplicate information, and even communication and collaboration, mainly based on the use of emails, was not the best procedure in terms of speed and accuracy.

In addition, manual management slowed down and prevented reliable control processes, and, finally, the internal resources were not sufficient to manage the infrastructure.

The client also requested a solution that would allow the most important countries to be independent in the management of product sorting, the “sequence”. However, at the same time, flexibility was required in order to allow centralized management of the digital catalog by the Italian staff and to provide daily and/or weekly updates with secondary countries.

The choice of a powerful and complete PIM allows the different needs of an international retailer to be managed, fulfilling the different wishes of local offices and different business areas.

In addition, the Business and IT teams wanted the global catalog to be present on each local PIM (Product Information Management) structure, with the ability to manage the saleability of certain products in individual markets. This would create a new and complex process for many countries. For them, in fact, it would have been the first approach with such a rich and structured catalog, which required intuitive and well-organized workflows.

The Informatica’s PIM, MDM-Product 360, is the best solution for such complex and flexible needs. The product features and the expertise of Lutech’s digital catalog projects team have made the following possible, amongst others:

• Management of product attributes not previously taken into consideration, now made available by the systems.
• Optimization of enrichment flows, of both product information and attributes.
• A data quality process based on automated control mechanisms, maximum accuracy of product information. In particular, the data quality process allows as many as 50 controls per session to be managed. Only if the process is successful is the product automatically published, otherwise the user will receive an alert to change the information entered.
• Management of the product sequence in a simple and intuitive manner, with the possibility to replicate sorting logic at the various levels of the sales categories, or to keep them independent of each other.

The solution adopted by Lutech has allowed five levels of product information to be managed to date, which can be increased through simple set-up activities, allowing action on different fronts: from creating hierarchies of models and style guides, to building the container of the various product options, with the different attributes that give rise to all possible models, through to classifying the EANs or SKUs with a specific size, which can actually be purchased.

The Product Information Management (PIM) project developed by Lutech alongside Informatica has made it possible to optimize search, with powerful search capabilities for different types of users.

The advantages are evident both for those who work directly on the PIM, in the merchandising and marketing functions, and need to easily find products, but also for those who manage sales and customer care, thanks to the information conducive to order management. This also applies to customers, who can now find products more easily, with better organized and richer information, leveraging the potential of long tail, with substantial benefits in terms of SEO.

The chosen platform allows specific tags to be associated with the products, which will be analyzed during the sales reporting phase. It is thus possible to collect and aggregate insights relating to the browsing behavior of consumers and their purchases, as well as from their product ratings in the online store.

Insight analysis is a strategic resource of predictive information for defining and creating the future collection, and for more effective targeting, proposing the right product to the right customer. In addition, Informatica’s PIM allows product descriptions to be acquired and then supplemented with content generated by users on the product page, such as photos and videos.

The main result of the optimized management of rich and consistent information was an improved customer experience on all channels and an acceleration of time to market.

Creation of a single repository for information and marketing data has allowed all incoming product data from different sources (ERP, PLM, DAM, data pools) to be centralized, as well as outgoing data on all omni-channel channels, achieving significant reductions in manual work for management of product data and catalogs and greater flexibility and possibility of enrichment of catalogs. Finally, the redefinition of collaborative processes between central and local departments should be emphasized.

The Fashion Retail brand has thus constructed a master database for product information, a single, main source for the entire supply and selling process.