SUCCESSFUL USE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN PRODUCT DATA MANAGEMENT

Speed, foresight and a willingness to change are crucial to ensure that the product selection always meets customers' needs - at the best possible price-performance ratio. As a Coop Group company with over 50 years of company history and around 170 branches, Interdiscount offers the densest sales outlet network in Switzerland in the home electronics sector.

In addition to a strong store presence, a strong online presence is crucial in order to survive in today's competitive home electronics market. Up-to-date, high-quality product information that is correctly linked and easy to find thanks to intuitive classification is the foundation of a successful online store. The home electronics sector is characterized by an extensive range of products with numerous features. Customers attach great importance to correct, detailed product descriptions, which make it easy to compare compatible products across suppliers.

For these reasons, Interdiscount chose the Onedot platform to seamlessly integrate automated classification, harmonization of brand names and linking of related products with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) into the existing product data management process, reduce manual data preparation, accelerate time-to-market and increase sales.

HOW ONEDOT HELPED

Interdiscount pursues a combined strategy and offers both merchandise and distributor products via drop shipment. Products can therefore come from different suppliers and must therefore be reliably linked and classified in order to provide customers with the best possible selection of products and suppliers.

The high data volumes of over one million SKUs, including long tail, present a particular challenge. All supplier articles are managed in the ERP at Interdiscount. For a successful listing in the online store, all items must first be classified in a corresponding ERP product group. Identical items with similar product information from different suppliers and data sources should be grouped together. As product data is onboarded from various data sources, brand and supplier names must be harmonized in order to reliably link identical items.

For this reason, Onedot created a complete integration of the Onedot platform into the ERP's input data stream for Interdiscount. In a first step, automated data pipelines link identical and related products with the help of complex requirements stored in the Onedot platform. In a second step, the linked products are then assigned to around 1000 product categories and harmonized by the AI-supported product classification module. Finally, the resulting product data is made available to Interdiscount for further automated processing via the Onedot SFTP endpoint. Each of these steps is carried out fully automatically several times a day, whereby Interdiscount employees can intervene to correct each step thanks to an optional feedback task. In this way, the product data is processed dozens of times a year with a high degree of precision in the suggestions for product classification and brand harmonization, which has greatly reduced manual effort.

In order to achieve a high degree of automation with simultaneously high data quality, the product data model (PDM) and a product data export (PDE) are also imported several times a day from Interdiscount via SFTP into the Onedot platform. Thus, a higher daily actuality of the product data can also be guaranteed. The machine learning models during product classification are trained and exported weekly based on the latest PDE.

THE RESULT

Interdiscount has found a long-term, strategic partner for large-scale onboarding in Onedot. Thanks to the AI-based solution, in which fully automated data pipelines classify, segment and harmonize the entire article master. This enables Interdiscount to ensure that the products are always presented online in the best possible data quality. The data synchronization helps Interdiscount to offer customers the best product with a comprehensive description at the best price. In this way, Interdiscount sets new standards with a high-quality shopping experience and reduces returns thanks to precise product information across suppliers.