The company started out with a narrow product assortment over a century ago. Today, customers are just as likely to buy categories such as outdoor living or cookware from one of the largest department store operators in North America, supported by a strong physical and ecommerce presence.
The retailer works with a wide and diverse network of suppliers, who naturally place high demands on any product onboarding system. Modernizing this process is a key step in a broader, ambitious four-year transformation strategy aimed at unifying the company’s physical and ecommerce operations.
Challenges
Improving the omnichannel experience
The retailer’s ambitious business transformation initiative is designed to accelerate customer focus, agility, and scalable growth. It positions the organization as more integrated and better aligned to compete through shared customer insights.
The goal is to enhance customer experiences through deeper data insights while unifying the underlying architecture across all retail channels. Achieving this required the retailer to modernize its approach to product data onboarding to manage increased volume and complexity, both for suppliers and internal teams.
With over 1,000 suppliers and a strategic shift toward omnichannel retail, the company needed the capability to ingest data for tens of thousands of products quickly, accurately and in a way that simplified the process for its suppliers.
The retailer had an established product onboarding solution in place, combining spreadsheets, automation, and a central data store. While it had effectively supported previous requirements, the solution was designed for a different level of scale and complexity. As business demands evolved, the system began to face limitations in keeping pace. Any new product onboarding solution would need to support current channels while also enabling the expansion into new ones.
To summarize, the company faced the following challenges:
- Meeting the growing demands of a new omnichannel retail strategy
- Handling increasing volumes and complexity of product data from over 1,000 suppliers
- Overcoming limitations of outdated onboarding processes not built for scale or speed
- Gaining deeper customer insights from fragmented and siloed data
Solution
Embracing automation, flexibility and user-friendliness
Leveraging Stibo Systems Platform for product information management since 2014, the company selected Stibo Systems Product Data Onboarding cloud service to replace its legacy product onboarding solution.
The new cloud service is fast and scales to a much higher volume of SKUs. Product Data Onboarding also allows for increased automation, mapping and validation. These three capabilities reduce errors and alleviate the strain on teams caused by manual data entry.
To make all this work, the retailer created a thorough, multi-month strategy to both deploy Product Data Onboarding and make the move as easy and painless as possible for its suppliers, who would be moved to the new system in waves over the course of a year.
The project called for a “Big Bang approach,” which required up to16 vendor management staff working across three tiers of support. The company created two supplier training tracks to bring vendor teams to the new system with as little disruption as possible. It also reinforced the training with a team of up to 10 dedicated support staff and a host of training materials.
“The training sessions were really great, and we got a lot of positive emails from our suppliers in that regard. That was a big win getting people on board.” Chapter Manager Product Data Platforms
The retailer also asked for, and received, dozens of customizations to the Stibo Systems solution to improve functionality for its use case. This included user interface (UI) tweaks, improvements to the data export/import system and enhanced attribute visibility.
A streamlined UI made it easier for users at the company and its suppliers to work with advanced workflows, and clear visibility of required fields reduced delays. Product data can now be imported and exported for a choice of categories, or via specific attributes. Finally, the onboarding timescale is now days, not months; the company has a realistic target of onboarding new products within 24 hours, which is a big performance improvement over the previous 12-week timescale.
“Our team is focused on two foundational goals: creating a single, centralized source of data and accelerating product onboarding from suppliers. To reach our aim of onboarding new products in as little as 24 hours, we need tools and systems capable of supporting that level of speed and efficiency.” Associate Vice President, Capability Activation
Technology benefits included:
- Successfully scaled to 1,000 suppliers
- Automation, mapping and validation increase accuracy and speed
- Efficient import and export by category or attribute
- Support for omnichannel retail
- Scales to high SKU volumes and performs at speed
- Advanced workflows, streamlined UI and clear data field visibility
“Over the past 12 months, we have has significantly expanded the scale of business operations with Stibo Systems, welcoming several massive waves of new suppliers onto the platform. One of the foundational goals for this transformation project was to have a single centralized spot for data collection. This would address the challenges and slowdowns caused by having multiple systems. With the help of Stibo Systems and its Product Data Onboarding, we have achieved that goal.” Associate Vice President, Capability Activation
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Outcomes
Faster time to market and a better supplier experience
To date, the retailer has successfully migrated 1,000 suppliers to the new Stibo Systems Product Data Onboarding cloud service and fully retired the old systems.
A survey to understand the impact of Product Data Onboarding on suppliers found improved vendor perception, significant improvements in onboarding speeds and high levels of satisfaction. Four in five responses stated the new solution was better than the prior approach, and 68 percent stated they were completing work faster. Key highlights included ease of use, real time error validation, live training sessions and the ability to view and understand channel categories easily.
By deploying Product Data Onboarding with a comprehensive, structured support plan, the company has built the foundation for the next step in its transformation journey.
