OfficeMax NZ provides everything from instant coffee and alcohol to crayons and art supplies for New Zealand’s workplaces and schools. The company supplies 100,000 businesses across Aotearoa with a choice of over 40,000 different items from 600 suppliers, all ordered through OfficeMax NZ’s ever-changing website. For three months a year, OfficeMax NZ also ships education products to both schools and parents, regular events that double the firm’s normal trading volume and demand another set of product information.
Challenges: A stratospheric growth imperative
Acquisition by private equity in 2018 meant a new mission for OfficeMax NZ: tenfold growth from a ANZ$50 million starting point. After decades – and multiple layers of technology solutions – the company needed digital transformation. Organic growth had resulted in a system for bringing in new products that took six weeks, four departments and 13 people. This practice wouldn’t keep pace with the aggressive growth plans, and those same employees’ skills and experience were needed to support the plans.
In addition, hundreds of suppliers, all at different levels of data maturity and tech adoption, made for a messy, unstructured data integration and ingestion process.
Rather than invest in technology to support working practices that wouldn’t scale, OfficeMax NZ’s Chief Technology Officer and Head of Transformation Jeff Sutton set out to create a Target Operating Model that mapped to value streams instead of functions.
In summary, OfficeMax NZ faced a number of obstacles to digital transformation, efficiency and growth:
- Processes for managing products and stock had evolved over time and could be made more efficient through transformation.
- Suppliers were unable to integrate their data with OfficeMax NZ’s systems.
- Three separate product hierarchies made it difficult to build unified data models or understand trends from data.
Solution: Transforming efficiency and innovation: OfficeMax NZ's journey with Stibo Systems Platform
Stibo Systems Platform served as the master data management (MDM) foundation for a massive business transformation program. It included reworking product master data and addressing integration with 600 suppliers to ensure the changes produced value downstream.
“Master data management was one of the key pillars in OfficeMax NZ’s transformation journey. In six months, Stibo Systems took us from six weeks to two hours to set up a SKU. That’s a huge benefit.” - Jeff Sutton, Chief Technology Officer and Head of Transformation
The new production system handles buy side and sell side master data and works with 600 suppliers, handling both the 20,000 SKUs distributed by OfficeMax NZ and the same number dropshipped directly from suppliers.
As it turns out, fast was about more than just efficiency.
“These changes were key because in the past, if it took too long to set up a new product on our systems, that product could already be obsolete before our customers even got to order it,” said Sutton.
Further hidden benefits emerge
The team also uncovered three separate product hierarchies in use by different teams, making it difficult to build a unified view of the business’ data, hampering reporting and decision making. Efficiently bringing together clean data from merchandising, sales and ERP revealed previously unseen trends within the business that could be addressed.
Integration via MuleSoft also allows data from the MDM to be fed into an advertising platform that can generate custom collateral for the sales team, with further refinement and targeting generated from user interactions to present customers with exactly what they need to do their jobs.
AI enhances OfficeMax NZ’s customer experience
OfficeMax NZ’s adoption of AI, integrated with Stibo Systems’ data platform, has significantly boosted both productivity and customer experience. Centralizing data into a single source of truth enables the company to test and implement AI-driven innovations with measurable impact.
One key advancement has been automating product content creation. AI now generates product descriptions directly from master data, reducing the process from five days to just a few hours. The marketing team reviews and approves the content before publishing, ensuring accuracy and brand consistency. “That reduced the process from five days to just a few hours,” said Sutton.
The company also enhanced its website with a natural language search tool. Customers can ask specific questions like “What is the most environmentally sustainable copy paper?” and receive tailored recommendations based on product attributes. This tool simplifies purchasing decisions by linking customers directly to relevant product pages.
Internally, the 300-strong sales team benefits from Product Guru, a newly developed AI-powered virtual assistant that suggests products based on customer needs. It leverages master data on criteria like product specifications, sustainability and warranties and matches prices against competitors to generate personalized recommendations. As a result, proposal preparation time has dropped from several days to just two hours per proposal.
Outcomes
Using the Stibo Systems solution brought a number of technological benefits to OfficeMax NZ. With a single source of data truth, the company could unlock efficiencies, get better insight into trends and behaviors and work more productively with suppliers large and small. The program has also set OfficeMax NZ up for successful adaptation to emerging technological changes – now and in the future.
- Improved data management and efficiency: Product setup times were cut from six weeks to two hours, with OfficeMax NZ able to assign just two people to maintain 40,000 SKUs instead of 13 staff across four teams.
- Consistent product hierarchies for better insight: A single product hierarchy made it easier for the company to map trends and get better insights.
- APIs for large suppliers and FTP access for small supplier catalogs: Dropshipping suppliers – who provide half OfficeMax NZ’s SKUs – take advantage of a combination of MuleSoft and Stibo Systems Platform to load their product catalogs into the OfficeMax NZ store and test configurations.
- Adaptability to technological change: Seismic change in the form of commercially available AI was turned into positive innovation because it could be enriched with master data.
Learn more about:
Product Experience Data Cloud
Stibo Systems Platform
Faster, more resilient and prepared for growth and innovation
In rapidly changing retail environments, companies like OfficeMax NZ benefit from efficient workflows, a single version of the truth, open integration with suppliers and partners, and the ability to adapt quickly to change and technological disruption.
OfficeMax NZ’s MDM adoption combined with the development of a Target Operating Model resulted in adaptable, scalable customer experiences and a system that works with and for employees, not against them.
