Blog
March 6, 2024
High-quality product data plays a central role in sales. But how can product information be efficiently delivered to target groups and touchpoints along the product data value chain? And how can companies use artificial intelligence profitably?
The successful Product Data Pilots series, organized by our partner hmmh, focused on exciting success stories this time around. Participants learned about best practices and lessons learned in the field of modern data management. Jürgen Pannek, Head of Digital Services at Einkaufsbüro Deutscher Eisenhändler (E/D/E), showed how they use AI-supported Onedot software to sustainably improve their product data onboarding processes.
Data completeness increased to over 80% with AI
With around 1,200 affiliated members, E/D/E is the largest purchasing and marketing association in Europe. Retail companies affiliated with E/D/E can purchase products and services from over 3,400 suppliers and also benefit from the electronic data center (eDC), which provides the best possible product data quality for (digital) resale. This allows affiliated companies to handle their sales process in one place, making it much more efficient.
High-quality product data represents a clear competitive advantage for E/D/E in several respects. As part of the decision-making process, various sources and channels for information and procurement are evaluated and reviewed. These channels must be fed with high-quality data in order to remain relevant. This, in turn, means that supplier onboarding takes on additional importance: only those who can quickly procure product data, prepare it accordingly, and make it available will be successful in the market. E/D/E is pursuing several goals with the automation of product data onboarding:
- Permanently up-to-date data: The premium supplier portal of the Onedot product data platform gives suppliers the opportunity to update product data and initiate onboarding at any time via self-service. This enables E/D/E to ensure that the data in the eDC is always of the right quality and up to date. It also means that more suppliers can be connected and full product ranges processed more quickly.
- Quality improvement: Immediate feedback on data quality via automatically generated reports allows reprocessing to be initiated with a single click and thus implemented automatically across all product groups. This significantly reduces the amount of data maintenance required.
- Increased data volume: Thanks to Onedot’s powerful artificial intelligence, assignments to the E/D/E data model are automated, making the onboarding process efficient, fast, and, above all, scalable.
Since E/D/E started using the Onedot product data platform, important milestones in data quality have been achieved. The mapping and assignment to E/D/E’s highly granular data model is particularly impressive: to date, 7.8 million characteristic values have been assigned, 4,400 base classes sorted, and around 120,000 products created via the digitized supplier onboarding process.
Learnings and dealing with AI in the onboarding process
By implementing efficient, digital processes, E/D/E has been able to increase suppliers’ willingness to provide data in the desired form and quality. This is mainly because there is no need to fill out time-consuming templates and communication with E/D/E runs smoothly via the product data platform. In addition, the error rate has been significantly reduced and data quality increased to over 90%, which in turn enables significant efficiency gains. In addition to a significantly accelerated time-to-market, it is particularly relevant for E/D/E that manual data maintenance efforts can be reduced and recurring tasks in the data onboarding process can be avoided.