Accelerate your PX Strategy with a Quick PIM Launch

We at Akeneo have been assisting our clients in implementing a new PIM for over 10 years; we would like to share some of those best practices with you. 

We’ve compiled the top three focus areas with you to accelerate your time to value, and to mitigate the risk of a project failing altogether: 

• Identify Clear Business Objectives – showcase why you’re investing in a PIM: what are you looking to achieve? Which pain points are you looking to solve? How will you measure the success of these objectives?

• Align Resources to Project Roles – identify the personnel to be assigned to the PIM implementation roles so you and your team are ready to hit the ground running. 
• Begin Cleansing your Product Data – your PIM is only as good as your product data, so you can get a jumpstart on cleaning up any stale data now to expedite your implementation. 

Let’s dive in a bit deeper on these three topics.

1. Identify Clear Business Objectives 

This is a critical first step in your PIM journey, as it provides the answer to “Why a PIM?” “Why Akeneo?” “Why NOW?” Providing answers to these questions enables you to set the foundation for proper change management internally, and to educate your team on why this investment in a PIM is so important to your organization, and to all of them individually. When identifying your business objectives, we have a recommended template to use and Action Item #1 asks the following questions:

• What is the problem you’re trying to solve?

• How does this problem impact you or others at your company?

• How does this problem impact your customers?

• How would you quantify this impact?

• How would you like to see it improved?

PZ Cussons clearly articulates their “why” behind purchasing Akeneo:

What we also include in the template is how you may track or manage the business objectives; providing metrics associated with the business objectives allows us to measure how successful the project is, and see the tangible progress you have made.   

2. Align Resources to Project Roles 

It is important to start planning which resources you will need internally to dedicate to your PIM project. This includes both the people that are contributors (creating and enriching product data and assets) and people that are consumers (benefiting immediately from high-quality and always up-to-date product data). 

We’ve written other blogs about Building the PIM Dream Team, as it is a vital step in preparing for your PIM journey. We have outlined roles to prepare you for your Akeneo PIM implementation in our downloadable deliverable as Action Item #2; this way, you can start writing down names to each and every role outlined so that both they and you know who is responsible for what. 

Assigning team members to roles before implementation puts you ahead of the curve and allows you time to set expectations both internally and externally as to your workload capacity to better prepare for your implementation phase and beyond in your Akeneo journey. 

An excellent example of how critical project roles are can be seen from one of our valued customers, Bongenie Grieder:

3. Begin Cleansing your Product Data 

We all know the saying “garbage in, garbage out,” and this applies to your PIM data as well. Your PIM is only as good as the data included inside of it, so having clean data will accelerate your business’ time to value in your Akeneo PIM journey. We’ve written other blogs about the importance of clean data, and this blog here includes an actionable deliverable diving into HOW one may go about doing so. As an excellent first step, start outlining where different data sets exist, and the owner of this data. Then, start reviewing your data for the quality of it. What do we mean by data quality?

• Product Duplicates: The same product duplicated
• Attribute Duplicates: Attribute definitions are varied but mean the same thing resulting in inconsistency in attribution
• Irrelevant data: Fields are used to maintain information that may not map to the PIM system schema or used to maintain information which shouldn’t be migrated
• Incomprehensible: Meaningless data that follows no guidelines
• Incomplete: Mandatory fields may have been circumvented
• Inconsistent: Standards for information may have been misinterpreted or arbitrary information populated
• Inaccurate: Information may be wrongly entered
• Not structured: No categorisation in legacy systems for effective mapping into the PIM. Wrong categorisation leading to wrongly attributed product
• Non conformance: Standards, structure and missing data and attributes for the product type

Even if you aren’t certain how you may want to restructure your data to fit into all of Akeneo’s features and functionalities and the best practices into how to leverage them, you can at least cleanse any data that you know needs cleaning up. And if you aren’t certain as to where to start, we recommend leveraging our downloadable deliverable and populating Action Item #3. 

One of our valued customers, Thras.io had this to say about data cleanliness:

Now that you’ve completed all of your action items, what is left is quite simple: beginning your Akeneo PIM journey and becoming one of the many trusted customers within the Akeneo community! 

Feel free to download our template outlining the three action steps for a quick PIM implementation, or reach out to an Akeneo expert today to see how we can help you accelerate your PX strategy.