Founded as a bookstore in 1926, Lyreco now offers a vast array of products to support modern workplaces around the world. The privately owned company, present in 25 countries, is the European leader and the third largest distributor of workplace products and services worldwide. Lyreco provides workplace essentials to businesses everywhere, ranging from office supplies, print services, and consumables to personal protective equipment and safety solutions, catering, hygiene, and furniture.
New strategies caused Lyreco to take a fresh look at how it brought tens of thousands of products to market around the world. In a sector with razor-thin margins, entering new markets and making significant architectural changes can be fraught with risk. But the cost of staying still was also clear.
While the company has sold mostly to enterprise buyers in recent years, it wanted to expand into the small and medium-sized business (SMB) market, as well as build a safety products business. It also wanted to boost the efficiency of its systems and avoid overspend.
With new customers expecting more polished experiences and a constant influx of new products to list and sell, Lyreco needed to get ahead of an increasingly complex product onboarding and information management process that led to significant workload increases for its teams.
The answer: a radical, multi-year transformation of its product data workflows, moving from multiple legacy systems to a modern cloud solution powered by Stibo Systems. The end result slashed time to market by half, automated a large volume of data entry tasks and helped improve the company’s search rankings across multiple international markets.
Challenges
New customers, new requirements and legacy challenges
The team at Lyreco understood that SMB customers looked for a very different customer experience. While large enterprises (Lyreco’s traditional customers) tended to use the Lyreco website as a buying platform, SMBs often took a different approach.
The company’s existing enterprise customers knew what they wanted to buy and often just searched by SKU. Conversely, SMB customers wanted to research products before ordering. Product descriptions and other content had to be consistent and of high quality – and that meant a lot more work for Lyreco’s staff.
Lyreco’s suppliers also had a tough job. Listing new or updated products with Lyreco involved juggling complex tools and processes and a significant amount of manual work to ensure descriptions met the data requirements.
It was imperative to improve the quality of the product-related content across multiple regions and languages. This was particularly challenging given that Lyreco’s offering includes tens of thousands of ever-changing products.
Creating dependable, consistent, high-quality product descriptions and other content is a time-consuming task, and the Lyreco team was already overextended with the task of adding and amending products as suppliers came to them with new lines. The process of collating, writing, editing and publishing content was also inefficient, requiring several specialists to complete.
The gap between existing tools and new demands placed more work on the shoulders of the content specialists. The repetitive work was difficult to do without introducing errors because the team relied on multiple systems that did not agree on a single version of the truth.
To summarize, Lyreco was experiencing the following challenges:
- New customers required more product information, and different regions had different language requirements
- Inconsistent and sometimes incorrect product content led to a poor buying experience and product returns
- Existing teams were overwhelmed with basic rote work, making it difficult to prioritize more important and satisfying tasks
- Suppliers had to juggle multiple systems and resort to manual data entry to list new or updated products with Lyreco
- Legacy systems were focused on internal processes, and adapting them to new external requirements had started to add complexity that outweighed their value
Solution
Migrating to SaaS for flexibility and future-proofing
After two decades of using legacy systems and tools for product content creation and management, Lyreco selected Stibo Systems Product Experience Data Cloud, hosted on Microsoft Azure, as the core of its new product automation approach.
Lyreco decided to migrate to Stibo Systems’ SaaS solution for product data management, recognizing its potential to deliver a more cost-effective framework for building robust master data management (MDM) capabilities. The strategic move supported enhanced data governance and compliance, while also providing the flexibility necessary to adapt to emerging technologies.
“We had an on-premises system that we used to manage product data management, which was Stibo Systems Platform. It was a great product, but it was on-prem and we knew if we wanted to use other modules, we needed to move to the cloud.” - Arnaud Delepouve, Product Owner Content, Lyreco Group
The Product Experience Data Cloud solution includes Product Data Onboarding and Product Information Management (PIM) cloud services. Lyreco sought to automate as much of the product onboarding and content management process as possible with the new solution.
With the newly implemented Product Data Onboarding, suppliers can now upload product content directly to Lyreco’s system, where prebuilt workflows validate, stage and prepare each content asset for use.
“If we wanted to exchange data with our suppliers, we had to be using a common data model, one that was easier to integrate. So, we had to look at our existing model, which has been very much internally focused for 20 years and rebuild it to be more aligned to product hierarchies and attributes used in the market. That way, when we went to our suppliers, we weren’t asking for something to be customized.” - Arnaud Delepouve, Product Owner Content, Lyreco Group
Faster content creation with AI
Turning product specifications and descriptions into flowing narratives that meet specific information requirements is a task that modern large language models (LLMs), a form of AI, excel at. By employing AI as part of the process, Lyreco could speed up content creation and reduce repetitive work for its content team, all while maintaining accuracy.
By connecting this AI-powered content engine to Stibo Systems PIM cloud service, Lyreco addressed the recurring problems of creating, adapting and updating product descriptions in multiple regions and languages for its own staff, suppliers and the new customer base.
Lyreco built around 20 automated workflows to check and validate incoming product data. These golden records created a single version of the content and other data, which would be used to build out descriptions and other assets in the next stage of the process.
The AI tool leverages this single version of the truth to start building descriptions suitable for the 25 markets in which the company operates. Part of the prompt for the AI is to look for differentiation and structure to enhance its search engine optimization (SEO) rankings. Data and content are shared among multiple countries, and content and regional teams can then further tweak the output to adjust for tone, focus and style.
Over time, Lyreco is slowly sunsetting older interfaces and routes by which suppliers can deliver product data, switching to Stibo Systems Product Data Onboarding cloud service, resolving a significant challenge for its suppliers. Using the PIM cloud service, suppliers can also view, adjust and improve how their products are described and appear on Lyreco’s site.
Looking ahead, the Lyreco team is exploring how they can transition this AI and automation workstream to Stibo Systems' own AI capabilities, bringing the intelligence even closer to the core of their product data infrastructure.
Outcomes
In a single project, Lyreco addressed challenges and capitalized on opportunities for customers, suppliers and internal stakeholders. What’s more, this investment in a massive data transformation created a solid foundation for future opportunities.
- Enhanced scalability: Uniform product descriptions allow Lyreco to scale more easily across 25 countries, its vast product portfolio and multiple languages. Product descriptions and other data can now be created once and rolled out in multiple locations and languages, eliminating duplicate effort and reducing errors.
- Faster time to market thanks to improved automation and operational efficiency: Instead of the slow, error-prone process of manually inputting data to onboard a product, new products can now be brought to market faster.
- Reduced return rates: With the new system in place, Lyreco noticed that fewer products were returned by customers, suggesting that the more accurate product descriptions helped buyers find the right product the first time.
- Improved SEO performance: SEO rankings are critical for Lyreco, particularly in newer markets. After the implementation, Lyreco’s product listings in the Thai market moved from the second page of Google search results to the second position on the first page.
- Employee morale: By fixing the manual data entry issue, the content team was free to focus on more creative tasks, including adjusting AI-generated copy.
“It’s more fun for our content teams because they’re making a difference. They can see it; it’s more measurable. But it’s also super exciting for the teams all over, not just our core offices, but also our teams in other countries because they can create local content.” - Arnaud Delepouve, Product Owner Content, Lyreco Group
Happier customers, more satisfied suppliers and faster time to market
Lyreco solved a number of problems in one stroke with its transformation project. It cleared growing technical debt, moved to a more scalable cloud architecture and streamlined multiple data workflows.
The efficiencies also strengthened supplier relationships, improved customer experiences for the new SMB sector Lyreco is targeting, and enabled the content creatives and local staff to spend their time on more strategic and rewarding work. Automation also resulted in better SEO performance, faster time to market and more consistent product merchandising.
