How E/D/E uses automation and AI as a booster for product data onboarding

High-quality product data plays a central role in sales. But how can product information be played out efficiently 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 this time on exciting success stories. 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 the AI-supported Onedot software to sustainably improve their product data onboarding processes.

Data completeness increased to over 80% with AI

With around 1200 affiliated members, E/D/E is the largest purchasing and marketing association in Europe. Trading companies that are members of E/D/E can source 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 means that affiliated companies can handle their sales process in one place and thus make 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 viewed. These channels must be fed with high-quality data in order to remain relevant. This in turn means that supplier onboarding becomes even more important: Only those who can procure product data quickly, prepare it accordingly and play it out will be successful on 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 onboardings at any time via self-service. In this way, E/D/E can ensure that the data in the eDC is always of the right quality and up to date. In addition, more suppliers can be connected more quickly and full product ranges can be processed.
• Quality improvement : Immediate feedback on data quality via automatically generated reports allows you to initiate reporting processes with a single click and thus implement them automatically across all product groups. This considerably reduces the data maintenance effort.
• Increased data volume: Thanks to Onedot's powerful artificial intelligence, mappings to the E/D/E data model are automated and make the onboarding process efficient, fast and, above all, scalable.

Since E/D/E has been 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 formed via the digitized supplier onboarding.

Learning and dealing with AI in the onboarding process

By setting up efficient and digital processes, E/D/E was able to increase the willingness of suppliers to provide data in the desired form and quality. This is primarily because no time-consuming templates need to be filled out and communication with E/D/E is simple via the product data platform. In addition, the error rate has been significantly reduced and data quality has been increased to over 90%, which in turn enables significant increases in efficiency. In addition to a significantly faster time-to-market, it is particularly important for E/D/E that manual data maintenance work is reduced and recurring work in the data onboarding process can be avoided.