Industry: Trade and B2B
A purchasing group, marketing alliance, competence network – for its approximately 4,000 trading partners in Europe, the EK Servicegroup takes on a variety of tasks. As a cooperative group with around 800 employees, EK Servicegroup is dedicated to leading medium-sized, owner-managed retailers into the digital future.
Based in Bielefeld, EK Servicegroup offers a unique service and a wide range of products to over 4,000 retailers in 17 countries as a purchasing group. With its 800 employees, the group supports its trading partners across the entire value chain. From optimal purchasing conditions, through intelligent logistics and ordering processes, a broad service network, to extensive marketing concepts for online and offline activities – EK Servicegroup proves to be a valuable business partner for retail companies.
The group collaborates with a multitude of suppliers in shaping its assortments. To provide trading partners with high-quality and, above all, complete information about their products, the key challenge is to harmonize various data sources optimally. The core assortment currently includes more than 30,000 products, maintained in 7 languages. As a modern company, EK Servicegroup has long relied on a clear omni-channel strategy in communication, cleverly combining traditional print channels with digital channels to enable customer-centric communication. For this reason, product information must not only be consistent in every channel but also be quickly available in channel-specific formats. This is particularly crucial when it comes to creating extensive print catalogs, which form the basis for the retailers’ orders.
EK Servicegroup relies on prodexa PIM for the maintenance and distribution of its product data. The platform supports companies with automated processes, such as regular imports of ERP master data. Additionally, manual adjustments can be made flexibly. All data streams converge in the PIM system, consolidating product information from various sources. Any information, whether master data from the ERP system, electronically transmitted data from suppliers, manually researched information from manufacturer sites, or product data from data pools like IceCat, are all brought together here. Efficient planning and production of print catalogs are the crucial use case for EK Servicegroup and thus a focus in the projects. With prodexa’s tools, data is prepared, planned, and fed into the layout. Layout templates and chapter structures are used to prepare them, enabling partially automated catalog creation.
Partial automation in catalog creation brings some challenges. Since some manual processes are involved that have not yet been fully automated, there are a total of 12 cross-departmental process steps in catalog creation. This not only costs resources in terms of monetary funds and human capital but also significantly extends lead times. In order to be able to respond quickly to acute market demands in the future and to meet consumers’ demand for personalized content, EK Servicegroup is now taking an innovative step in a joint project with our partner AutLay. The company develops forward-looking solutions for AI-based creation of print-ready catalogs and avoids the use of classic templates. The technology behind AutLay is based on years of research and has proven to be extremely effective and efficient in practice. The software draws on product data from prodexa PIM and generates individual pages fully automatically. The underlying algorithm assembles the pages based on predefined parameters and automatically determines the optimal version in terms of aesthetics and economic parameters from various options. Initially launched as a pilot, the benefits of the solution quickly became apparent – reduced lead times led to significantly lower costs and, above all, more up-to-date product information.
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