Integrations
Successful omnichannel strategy for Veritas
Veritas is a Belgian retail chain, with shops in Belgium and Luxembourg, which has a wide range of products. You will find accessories, jewellery, hosiery, sewing materials and all kinds of hobby materials to get creative yourself.
They sell existing brands but also have private labels such as Insua for shapewear, socks, tights and sOxi for trousers and socks. luxembourg
Challenges in managing product data
An extensive product range and restrictions within their ERP structure made managing product data a difficult task. Responding quickly to actua and putting some products live in no time was virtually non-existent.
Moreover, the marcom team noticed many obstacles when it came to the consistency of their product data, such as descriptions, brands, colours, images, etc.
The Akeneo PIM implementation project
The implementation of PIM was part of a larger e-commerce journey based on Akeneo, Magento 2 and Mulesoft as the integration framework. Akeneo PIM pioneered the bigger turnaround that Veritas wanted to make.
The link with ERP was made in phases, then the outdated PIM system (Sparkow) was replaced, and finally a new webshop based on Magento 2 was launched, which is fed with enriched Akeneo PIM product data.
The different phases and speeds were tailored to Veritas’ needs. During the PIM discovery phase, sufficient time was taken to collaborate with the various stakeholders (logistics, creative team, e-commerce) to get the most out of the PIM project.
During the PIM modelling phase, there was a strong focus on the ERP data structure and the specific requirements of the new web shop.
Induxx’s mapping bundle
To pour as much data as possible from the ‘limited’ ERP into the new Akeneo PIM structure, we used our mapping bundle. The mapping bundle allows Veritas to flexibly and automatically create products, link them to seasons with specific promotions and immediately also link Google merchant data.
Products such as ribbons and fabrics are automatically provided with saleable linear metre values with minimum and maximum orders in PIM. Commercial colour and size data are automatically enriched in PIM based on colour and size tables. We used our expertise to extend the Akeneo standard functionality with new attribute types. In this way, Veritas can quickly act itself to adjust the required deviations on the automatically filled fields in PIM.
Product images are automatically linked to the products in PIM based on their file names and stored on an AWS S3 asset container from Veritas. The Induxx AWS S3 connector thus ensured that both during onboarding and linking, the Akeneo application environment was never burdened with the images themselves.
Veritas also enabled the Induxx Magento 2 Seamless Integration Bundle to automatically create and update products in Magento. All product-related Magento data from attributes, options, attribute sets, images, to even custom media gallery roles are controlled by this bundle. The ability to also selectively send products to Magento played a decisive role here.
Besides the strong out-of-the-box functional basis this bundle contains, we delivered specific features at Veritas’ request. For instance, Akeneo submodels were automatically converted to Magento configurables and commercial meter values of an Akeneo PIM product were immediately delivered as Magento stock attributes.
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