The Purchasing Office of German Ironmongers (E/D/E) is the European service and system provider for the production connection trade (PVH). The approximately 1,200 affiliated members are for the most part specialist wholesalers who primarily supply commercial customers from trade, industry and local authorities. Companies affiliated with E/D/E can choose from over 1,750,000 products from around 3,200 contract suppliers and thus optimize and centralize their sales process.

Trading primarily in tools and machinery, industrial supplies, fittings and construction elements, products for occupational safety and technical Commerce, building services and steel, trading companies also benefit from the electronic Data Center (eDC), which provides high-quality product data. The high data quality is ensured by a specially developed classification standard "eDC Cl@ss". In order to speed up the largely manual and therefore extremely time-consuming supplier product data onboarding process, E/D/E was looking for a technology partner to automate this process.

HOW ONEDOT HELPED

E/D/E pursues an ambitious data strategy with the aim of providing members with a comprehensive and relevant range of product information in the best possible product data quality for (digital) sales. Very high data quality is particularly important because the affiliated retailers can use the product information available in the eDC for marketing via various digital and analog sales channels as well as for procurement. In order to automate this comprehensive data strategy with the targeted use of artificial intelligence, E/D/E uses Onedot's product data platform to efficiently and automatically onboard supplier data and to further enrich the existing article master using attribute extractions.

The Onedot product data platform reduces manual effort, especially in the creation of articles, as this can be significantly simplified via the platform. The Onedot AI maps the supplier's product catalog to the complex data model of E/D/E's eDC with system support. The Onedot AI can not only categorize products and map attributes correctly for specific categories, it also knows how to convert value lists and units accordingly and make adjustments in accordance with the specified data model. Once the initial item creation has been completed, the mappings and user feedback can be applied to the next catalog update, allowing the degree of automation to be increased with each processing run.

E/D/E also uses Onedot to create golden records. This module of the Onedot product data platform comes into play when the same product is loaded into the Onedot product data platform by different suppliers or a supplier sends a data update for an existing product. Finally, articles are merged into products based on the variant-forming attributes before an import file for the eDC is finally created from the onboarding result. This can then be read in directly by the target system. With this clearly structured and automated supplier product data onboarding process, 120,000 products with more than 1,000,000 articles have been processed to date.

In addition to automated product data onboarding, E/D/E uses other Onedot AI functionalities to transfer existing product data information from the marketing content management system to the eDC. Originally designed only for the print sector and having reached the end of its life cycle, a way had to be found to transfer important but unstructured product information created in continuous text into E/D/E's eDC. The Onedot AI can extract attributes from the continuous text created in the editorial system, structure them and reassign them according to the eDC classification. So far, over 100,000 SKUs from 22 product groups have been correctly transferred to the eDC.

THE RESULT

By using the Onedot platform, E/D/E can automatically and centrally provide the complete manufacturer product data in a comprehensive classification standard across all manufacturer data in the best possible quality. With the targeted use of the Onedot product data platform, not only have around 150 suppliers been connected to date, but the initial processing time for supplier catalogs has now been reduced to 4 weeks per supplier catalog. Today, data updates take less than a week. This has led to a significant acceleration in time-to-market and a reduction in process costs.

In addition to automating the onboarding of supplier catalogs, E/D/E also uses Onedot AI to enrich and refine a large amount of product data. In addition to the possibility of enriching product information using attribute extraction, the system-supported creation of golden records for digital sales is also an essential component. The key to reducing manual effort and streamlining lengthy onboarding processes is the profitable use of artificial intelligence. Specialist retailers benefit from the best possible product data quality for sales and can market new products much earlier.