Customer Success story

Leveraging Product MDM, Mason Companies increases speed-to-market and consolidates product information for the benefit of their customers

About Mason Companies

Mason Companies is a family owned business and a market leader in footwear apparel. Founded in 1904, it’s now the largest mail order footwear company in the world and a leading ecommerce retailer in the US.

Executive Summary

With ten different brands (e.g., ShoeMall and Stoneberry), Mason Companies uses Stibo Systems’ Product MDM platform as an enterprise solution to onboard products from over 1,000 suppliers to each of these brands. This approach streamlines their business operations and prevents organizational siloes.

A fast and smooth product onboarding and having a single, consolidated source for product data are the primary benefits, supporting both improved operational efficiencies as well as excellent customer experiences.

“It all starts with our product data, making sure that it’s sound and is supporting those initiatives with our customers,” says Adam Birkholz, Senior IT Business Analyst.

Enabled by innovative features and by leveraging AI, product lifecycle management and multiple domains, the company has set out to scale their business to be sure they remain their customers’ trusted shopping destination.

The Business Payoff

Scaling for the future. Using the MDM platform as their Digital Business Hub has enabled Mason Companies to increase their speed-to-market, scale the business and prepare it for excellence in consumer experience.

Workflow automation and establishing a single source of truth has helped consolidate product data for improved customer experiences ensuring loyalty and solidifying their position as a market leader.

The Customer Experience

Award winning data management. Since 2012, the flexibility of the platform has allowed Mason Companies to scale the business and continues to do so.

The support from Stibo Systems during and after the implementation has enabled them to take full advantage of the solution, resulting in an achievement award from independent analyst firm The Information Difference for their innovative use of MDM.

“It all starts with our product data, making sure that it’s sound and is supporting those initiatives with our customers.”

Adam Birkholz, Senior IT Business Analyst, Mason Companies.

Challenge

In 2011, the company had come to an impasse. Their legacy technology stack was limiting their growth, and the traditional supply chain applications on the market did not provide the needed flexibility to optimize product onboarding processes.

Data siloes hindered a smooth workflow and made it difficult to coordinate changes. Every change required massive testing for their entire suite of applications.

Solution

The solution was to view the product data from a master data perspective using a dedicated MDM platform decoupled from the supply chain applications. That immediately provided the flexibility to rapidly enhance merchandizing and product marketing operations.

The solution supports organic growth across all channels and divisions and provides a platform for innovation with multidomain capabilities.

Result

In ecommerce where speed-to-market is everything, Stibo Systems Multidomain MDM has helped the company onboard more products faster without adding resources as they grow. Over the past three years, they have onboarded more than one million SKUs and simultaneously increased general data quality. Automation enables the employees to do their jobs more efficiently and scale their efforts to accelerate growth.

Future

With MDM, Mason Companies can now develop their business without system constraints. Taking full advantage of the multidomain capabilities, they are adding product lifecycle management and customer, vendor and pricelist information to their current MDM platform.

The next major breakthrough will be to deploy AI and machine learning. By training the algorithm of the MDM they can automate several processes further: classifying new products, mapping content to their data model and discovering, extracting and generating additional product content. This will speed up product onboarding and reduce time-to-market even more while reducing costly manual errors.

Ultimately, this enables Mason Companies to improve their customer loyalty and to remain the trusted online shopping destination in years to come.

Leveraging the MDM solution, our goal is to continue to be the trusted shopping choice by providing an excellent shopping experience.”

Adam Birkholz Senior IT Business Architect, Mason Companies Download Success Story

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