Product Information Management (PIM) is an important topic for every company that manages more than a handful of products.

Efficient Handling of Product Information with Akeneo

January 16, 2016

Product Information Management (PIM) is an important topic for every company that manages more than a handful of products. Because an efficient PIM tool saves time, money and stress.

When it comes to web projects where the administration and presentation of product information on different channels play a central role, we use an open source PIM – Akeneo.
Below we describe seven key advantages of handling Product Information Management with Akeneo. Maybe it is a solution which can benefit your company as well.

1) Outstanding usability

Handling Akeneo is easy to understand and to learn. The user interface of the PIM unites flat design trends and excellent usability. Akeneo is optimized to be operated by people with no technical background. The intuitive handling reduces the initial training effort to zero.

Akeneo Usability

2) Benefits of managing product data with Akeneo?

Any company with a larger stock list knows the challenge of managing product information. The situation in a traditional company may look as follows: a large part of the product data is stored in an ERP system; additional information for the website is stored in the CRM system and marketing information is partly administered by the employees in their local files. Thus, you might collect product information more than once and work with inaccurate data. Akeneo allows you to centralize all product information. This avoids duplication in product collection and enrichment of product information. Hence, you get rid of the cumbersome maintenance of several spreadsheets and parallel systems.

3) Easy mass import of product data and images

Keeping product information up to date is not the only issue at hand. On every e-shop, you need to add new product collections on a regular basis. So, a product information management system is a fast solution to import product data. On Akeneo you can add thousands of articles at the push of a button. When importing, Akeneo detects whether it needs to create a new product or update an existing one. Moreover, it allows you to upload many image files all at once. And, you can continue working with Akeneo without interruption during the import process. Also, you can schedule automatic imports from different sources.

4) Product data enrichement?

The Akeneo product editor allows you to make changes to individual products. With Product Enrichment, you can also combine filters and edit multiple products using Mass Edit. For example, with just a few clicks, you can flag all articles of a collection as “New in product line”. Likewise, you can also store product relationships such as serial, variant, upselling or cross-selling. You can also store your own types of product relationships; in case you need to use promotional packages or compatibilities.

 

Akeneo Produktedaten Anreicherung

5) Supplying web services and multiple channels

Similar with other PIM, Akeneo has the ability to propagate data on different destinations. These so called channels may be anything you need from an e-commerce website, a brochure or a mobile app. In this way, you could provide shorter product descriptions for mobile users or offer certain products only in the e-shop. Akeneo enables full control over your channel settings. Also, it ensures that each channel is always up-to-date with relevant top-level data. Through Cronjobs, you can carry out automated exports on regular intervals. And the Akeneo REST API ensures that other web services can handle the provided product data.

6) Multilingualism

Akeneo is multilingual and supports Japanese, Chinese, Russian and Arabic characters. You can display a new language to your website or e-shop, by adding a translation pack in Akeneo. The Akeneo translation function offers excellent usability. Pro Attributes can be set so you can translate only the labels or the values themselves.

Akeneo Mehrsprachigkeit

7) Customization capabilities

Since Akeneo is an open source software, you can customize its extensions to fulfill the needs of our clients. For example, we have adjusted the import function on a renowned comparison platform for environment-friendly products. As a result, we were able to ensure that Akeneo’s import capabilities fitted our client’s work processes.

To add other content besides the product information (pages, blog posts, etc.) we have combined Akeneo with the open source CMS, Drupal.

If you would like to know more about the use of Akeneo PIM, don’t hesitate to contact us.