The transition of brick and mortar stores into click and mortar with AI-powered ProductiWise

The Business Need

A half-century old multi-billion dollar B2B supplier and a worldwide leader in electronic components distribution wanted to advance from physical brick and mortar stores to a click and mortar store. Starting an online store posed various challenges; one of it being catalog creation for a voluminous product SKUs owned by the retailer. Their basic requirement was to get their huge catalog information online within a limited time frame. The bulk volumes of product information cannot be manually entered onto the marketplaces and hence they looked out for an automation tool to onboard large volumes of product information delivering accurate outputs in lesser time.

Challenges we faced

The B2B catalog design and the business models were complex to move in accordance with the online store guidelines. Fresh move to the online retail business meant that the categorization, category specific attribute sets, and content description were all to be re-thought ground up. The original data comes in all formats including data feeds, PDFs, complex tabular columns, and even print. This needed standardization to normalize data for conversion into apples-to-apples comparable online data.

How we solved the problem

ProductiWise had the right toolsets to break down the complexities in the varying formats of data and make it into a simpler workflow with the appropriate tools.

The Workbench section of ProductiWise had the tools to manage the input data in any format - HTML, PDF or image and the validation/enrichment screens alongside to increase the productivity.

The automated search functionality provided additional sources searched from the web to make the job easier.

The work was done in a managed services model with Mobius working on the taxonomy, attribute sets and allowed values category wise and updating the data. The client had a full visibility of the progress and tools to do sampling QA to provide interim feedback and direct upload for QA certified output.

Results

The complex set of processes starting from finalizing the category wise taxonomy/attribute set to creating the enriched online catalog, the estimated time to completion was cut in half with the help of ProductiWise.The next phase of it was getting the suppliers’ feeds onboarded to ProductiWise directly so the catalogs can be made omnichannel-ready faster.

Complexities in the varying formats of data were standardized

Time to live of catalogs was cut in half with ProductiWise

Catalogs were omnichannel-ready

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