Sodimac supplies home improvement and décor products to consumers and the building trade alike across South America. The business started over 50 years ago as a Chilean building co-operative and expanded into Colombia in 1993, growing to 42 stores across 28 cities. Today, Sodimac Colombia is a true omnichannel retailer, with sales through physical stores, call centers, its online store, and a mobile app.
A journey toward digital transformation
Sodimac Colombia needed to improve the quality of its product information and reduce the time it took for new products to reach market, ensuring the right information and specifications were published on its website.
With a stated aim of selling 600,000 products by 2026, the company had a big hill to climb. In 2018, its inventory contained 39,000 active products, and it could fully onboard and enrich new products at a rate of 1,000 per month. To reach more than half a million products, it would need to change the systems and processes it currently used – while ensuring its customers had all the product information they needed prior to purchasing.
The need for data modernization
Sodimac Colombia’s team used Excel spreadsheets and email to collect and store product data. The data was also stored in multiple locations, and several different teams within the company had to independently search for product information to reference in its catalogs, web pages and store collateral.
“We had a manual process where many people searched for product information for the website, catalogs and store cards. So, we had incomplete, unstructured information in different places. We needed to optimize the process, reduce onboarding and publishing time, and improve scalability to significantly expand the catalog.”María Isabel Rodríguez Bocanegra, Assistant Manager Commercial Operations, Sodimac Colombia
As a result, the product information collected and stored at Sodimac Colombia was unstructured, often incomplete and spread across multiple platforms.
Data is vital to comply with safety and environmental regulations
Aside from causing a lot of extra work for employees, ensuring each product had the correct regulatory compliance data attached to it was difficult. Colombia’s product safety and compliance laws require Sodimac Colombia to provide safety certification for a number of its products – building materials, electrical appliances and chemicals, for example.
Strict environmental rules require data on recycling, as well as water and energy efficiency. Some products have specific shelf lives – for example, some paints need to be disposed of after 2-10 years for safety reasons – and ensuring the right information is available at all points in the sales and lifecycle of each product is critical.
The manual, fragmented data collection process also led to long product onboarding times. It could take up to 60 days to add a product, and scaling the process was not practical. This limited the speed at which the company could expand its product catalog. Sodimac Colombia had a target of making 600,000 products available for sale by 2026.
Finally, online channels also require a higher volume and quality of product information since buyers can’t look at the product in person. The company needed to increase both the volume and quality of information on each product it brought to market.
To summarize, Sodimac Colombia experienced the following challenges:
- Manual, fragmented processes: It relied on manual input, spreadsheets and information stored in multiple locations across multiple teams.
- Lack of data structure and quality control: Product information was unstructured, incomplete and spread across multiple platforms.
- Inefficient and slow product onboarding: Collecting, preparing and publishing product information could take up to 60 days, and the process could not be scaled to work in parallel, resulting in a catalog bottleneck.
- Incomplete data for digital transformation and regulatory compliance: Customers lacked adequate product details for online shopping, and the company risked missing legal requirements.
Sodimac Colombia’s commercial operations and omnichannel teams knew they needed to modernize their business’s data handling. As luck would have it, the parent organization in Chile had started on the same journey a few years before.
“It took 60 days to publish a product. One of our goals was to standardize the information we collected from the products. We were using Excel spreadsheets with macros, and that was no longer sustainable for the growth the company was looking for. So, our main objective became organizing the information, standardizing the data model, and reducing the time it takes to onboard a product.”Hector Julio Pedroza Garzón, Head of Commercial Operations, Sodimac Colombia
Adopting and adapting best PIM practice
Sodimac Chile had already adopted Stibo Systems Product Experience Data Cloud, giving the Colombian team a clear example to build on. They seized the opportunity to learn from the existing implementation and, by adopting and connecting to the same master data management (MDM) platform, made transferring product data and information easier.
Future-proofing data
Sodimac Colombia implemented Stibo Systems Product Experience Data Cloud, hosted on Microsoft Azure. In making this choice, the company addressed a series of challenges and built a structure for growing its data platform to meet its goals for 2026.
Moving its data to Product Experience Data Cloud enabled Sodimac to standardize its product data onboarding process. It also created a single platform for managing all product data, making it accessible to all teams and allowing for better product information integration across multiple sales channels, boosting its omnichannel strategy.
Digitalization and automation empower a skilled workforce
Digitalization and automation of the company’s product information management (PIM) replaced manual, spreadsheet-based workflows. In addition, suppliers could now efficiently upload product data and images directly to the company. What was once a major hurdle, product information completeness, has now been resolved. By implementing business rules and KPIs in the Stibo Systems Platform, Sodimac Colombia was, for the first time, able to monitor the completeness and quality of its product data.
By adopting the same platform as Sodimac Chile and the broader group, the Colombian team enhanced data consistency across the enterprise.
In summary, Sodimac Colombia realized the following benefits:
- Improved efficiency and reduced product onboarding time: Publishing time was cut from 60 to 15 days per product, achieving a 75% reduction in time to market.
- Increased product catalog size: The company’s product volume grew by more than 800% to 230,000 SKUs, with the capacity and capability to add 6,000 new products monthly.
- Better compliance and data governance: Centralized documentation ensures regulatory compliance and informed buying choices for consumers and trade customers alike. Maintaining accurate compliance records helps ensure products meet regulatory requirements.
- Enhanced digital transformation: A single source of truth gave the omnichannel team powerful, flexible resources, improved data quality, and boosted the performance of its digital retail channels.
- Better interorganizational collaboration: Importing products from other parts of the Sodimac business in other countries was made simpler.
- Effective team utilization: Instead of chasing information across multiple teams and managing increasingly cumbersome spreadsheets distributed across the organization, the team can now concentrate on supporting suppliers and customers and transforming their catalog to support omnichannel growth.
“After we implemented the Stibo Systems Platform, the way our organization works has changed incredibly. Today, we are much more organized, we have better control over the product onboarding process, we now know the status of each product, we ensure better compliance with the requirements of each product, and we work much more efficiently.”María Isabel Rodríguez Bocanegra, Assistant Manager Commercial Operations, Sodimac Colombia
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“The company has a goal of reaching 600,000 products by 2026, and without Stibo Systems, we wouldn’t have come this far. We’ve already reached 230,000 and are adding 6,000 new products each month, complete with all attributes and photos, while publication times continue to decrease more and more. The support provided by this solution and the Stibo Systems team is very important.“Hector Julio Pedroza Garzón, Head of Commercial Operations, Sodimac Colombia
The end results are a single source of truth for product data. Data quality is also improved, which has a noticeable effect on the performance of the company’s digital channels. The company has also grown its catalog volume by more than 800% – with the same number of team members the old systems required. The improvements in data quality and accessibility have also freed those same teams up to concentrate on more value-added activities, such as improving supplier support.
