Overview
Stockmann, a leading Nordic retailer, operated on a fragmented product onboarding process across ERP, Excel macros, and inconsistent supplier formats, leading to data errors, long setup cycles, and costly downstream rework. By partnering with us, Stockmann redesigned the entire approach, transitioning product creation ownership to PIM to establish a standardized, automated, and scalable onboarding flow.More
Stockmann, a leading Nordic retailer, operated on a fragmented product onboarding process across ERP, Excel macros, and inconsistent supplier formats, leading to data errors, long setup cycles, and costly downstream rework. By partnering with us, Stockmann redesigned the entire approach, transitioning product creation ownership to PIM to establish a standardized, automated, and scalable onboarding flow. As a result, new suppliers now go live in hours instead of weeks, manual dependencies are eliminated, and Stockmann's product data is ready for AI-driven enrichment at scale.
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Business Challenge
Stockmann is a prominent multichannel retail company operating in Finland and Baltics, that offers a diverse and high- quality range of fashion, cosmetics and home products. Their business depends on speed, as frequent seasonal product updates, high SKU volumes, and multi-channel distribution require agile, clean, and consistent product data. However, the existing product creation process operated around ERP, supported by a patchwork of Excel-based templates, macros, and manually maintained validation rules. Each supplier followed their own format, making onboarding slow and error-prone. Moreover, new supplier activation routinely took weeks, data issues surfaced late in the cycle, and downstream teams in logistics, e-commerce, and analytics bore the cost of corrections. This existing model could not scale. Stockmann partnered with us to reimagine the entire process.
Our Approach and Solution
We introduced a product-first onboarding approach, shifting from ERP to PIM and treating it as the entry point for all product data. The solution rests on:
Business and Community Impact
The transformation delivered immediate and measurable results:
- Reduction in Onboarding Time: Supplier onboarding time dropped from weeks to just a few hours, freeing business teams from setup delays and enabling faster time-to-market across seasonal and long-tail products.
- Elimination of Manual Dependencies: Excel dependencies and macro-driven processes are eliminated, minimizing coordination overhead and the risk of human error.
- Data Validation: Product-level data validation reduces downstream corrections across ERP, logistics, and e-commerce significantly.
- Unified Product Data Model: A standardized product hierarchy links across old and new structures to enable consistent data enrichment for e-commerce operations across all business processes.
- Scalable and AI-ready Architecture: The platform scales effortlessly as Stockmann's catalog grows, and the structured, clean data foundation now enables AI-driven enrichment and advanced analytics, positioning PIM as a strategic business asset.
OPIL (Optimized Product Information Lifecycle) is a game changer. It digitalizes some parts of the product creation process and transforms the rest. We did not just move product data creation from Excel files to a system — we transformed the work itself; manual tasks disappeared as new configuration work appeared. AI would not have helped us without also changing our product hierarchy to a standard one and creating a new hierarchy to describe our buying organization's responsibilities. All hierarchies are now linked through the new product data model — allowing us to enrich product data dynamically to our eCommerce site and utilize it across all Stockmann processes. And yes, we now use AI to create and enrich product data, because the data quality is finally high enough to do so. OPIL changed the game. Now we focus our efforts on what really matters to the customer: better quality product data — not manual tasks and mistakes.