Akeneo has just launched the new version of its Product Information Management (PIM) system, the Akeneo PIM 4.0. The French company has taken advantage of the Akeneo PIM Summit 2020, the annual meeting of customers and partners held in Paris on February 5 and 6, to present it.
With this evolution, which comes to replace version 3.2, the performance of the solution increases substantially, and allows customers to benefit from faster imports and exports. Time to market is also shortened and scalability is increased to expand product catalogs. These are the main novelties that the Akeneo PIM 4.0 presents.

Improve the product experience

One of the new functionalities, and one of the most relevant, of Akeneo PIM 4.0 is the Asset Manager. This central dashboard enables business users to organize and enrich all kinds of product-related digital assets. They will be able to visually manage and transform digital assets to deliver robust, channel-specific product experiences, and link assets to product catalogs through improved API (application programming interface) level integration with Digital Asset (DAM) systems. Management) existing.

Quality Product Information

The Data Quality Insights functionality is another of the novelties that the Akeneo PIM incorporates. Assess the accuracy and quality of product data, automatically flag misspellings and incorrect formatting, and display data quality ratings on a color-coded dashboard. Users get automated suggestions to improve product data, quickly correct errors, and ensure accuracy and consistency of product data Introducing the new Akeneo PIM 4.0

Franklin Insights suggests

Franklin Insights, the library of technical product information developed by Akeneo, takes another leap forward. It integrates a new attribute mapping feature that uses machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically suggest product attributes for product catalogs. Marketers will be able to review and accept Franklin’s suggestions with a single click, ensuring an optimized path to product data enrichment.

A more simplified administration

The last of the news that we want to explain to you from the ASM Web Services team at Akeneo PIM 4.0 is the new connections module. It simplifies connection management by using efficient API-based integration to allow users to easily establish and manage third-party connectors from a single pane of glass. This new feature includes a dashboard to easily monitor data flows in and out of the PIM, enabling effortless security management between applications.

2019 has been a hectic year for ASM Web Services and loaded with various projects, but if there is a technology that we have worked on that has taken the cake, that has been the cloud. The year that we have just said goodbye has undoubtedly been the definitive push for cloud solutions.
The ASM Web Services team has migrated around 5,000 mailboxes to Microsoft Office 365 throughout 2019. We have developed projects of this type for the companies Damm (beer group), Stada (laboratory) and the Institute of Religious of San José de Girona (health sector). This figure will increase in the year that we open because in the second half of 2019 we started the migration projects of Werfen (hospital solutions) and General Optica (optical products).

Last months of existence of IBM Smart Cloud

Some of the mail forwarding projects to the cloud we have carried out are a consequence of the announcement made in August 2019 by HCL Technologies. The Indian multinational will stop the development of IBM SmartCloud Notes in July 2020, a complete mail service in the cloud that has millions of users worldwide.

Faced with this new scenario, from the ASM Web Services team we believe that the most appropriate alternative for current IBM SmartCloud Notes users to keep their mail operational is to migrate to another cloud platform. One of the most powerful on the market is Microsoft Office 365. ASMWS has experience in this type of migration and has a team of four people certified by Binary Tree to carry out this kind of project.

Migration does not interrupt activity

When making mail migrations to the cloud, and to ensure that the customer can continue with their activity during the process, our team has developed a coexistence strategy. What does this mean? The old company email coexists for a certain time with the new email in the cloud while users are gradually migrating. During this period of coexistence, we designed a specific configuration with Binary Tree —ASMWS is a certified company for its use— to prevent information from being lost and the user to appreciate that this process is underway. This same solution with Binary Tree has been used in many of the largest messaging migrations in the world (Exxon Mobil, Novartis, Bank of New York).

Working in the antipodes with Goldcar

The year that we just said goodbye has also served for several members of our team to go to work to the other side of the world: Australia and New Zealand.

Our team assumed the coordination, together with local partners, of the validation and technological implementation of the services of the Goldcar company for its landing in Australia. They were integrated for a few weeks in the corporate expansion team of the multinational car rental company. Keep reading the second part of our summary of the year-

Traditionally, the B2B customer has been considered to have different needs than the B2C customers. I think the statement is partially true. If you allow me, I will explain it to you.
One point that has been worked on a lot in the field of B2C is prescription. Brands take many actions to get their customers to become prescribers, but this strategy is less frequent in the B2B field.

What is a prescriber?

A prescriber is the person who influences other potential buyers by commenting on a product, brand or service. We all know that there is no better recommendation than someone we consider to be an authority on a topic or someone with whom we share problems.

What does a PIM have to do with the prescription?

Prescribers are not just satisfied customers who recommend products that have done well for them and destroy those that have not. A prescriber is also generated by creating expectations about the products that are to come and generating interest in the rest of the products that you may not even have tried. This is where product information becomes critical.

How am I going to prescribe your products if I don’t know them?

To offer an optimal service and provide the potential prescriber with the best information from the product catalog, I need corporate tools that facilitate centralizing, maintaining and enriching this information. That is where the PIM makes its appearance, allowing the different areas of a company to collaborate to enrich the information and distribute it to the different channels, providing a personalized experience adjusted to each medium. It will not be the same information that I need to publish in my eShop, in a Marketplace or for my paper catalog.

At ASM Web Services we can help you implement these tools to improve processes and reduce Time To Market in the life cycle of your products. We have implemented Akeneo PIM –ASMWS is the software company’s partner in Spain– in different business environments and we have extensive experience in organizing and optimizing highly complex catalogs.

More quality information, more prescribers

To generate prescribers it is essential to provide the maximum amount of information possible about the product, variations, specific characteristics that may be of interest to a specific sector and never forget the visual aspect, adding images, demonstration videos and technical documents that can increase the interest and knowledge. Also, giving interesting and comprehensive product information shows that you care, not only about your product, but also about your customers.
It is very difficult to provide this level of richness with different spreadsheets that are distributed and versioned throughout the company, and where each one makes their transformations and additions, with the images in a shared folder and the product name limited to the 26 characters that ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) allows me.

Rodrigo País-Garay, e-commerce functional consultant de ASM Web Services