Leading home and furnishing Retailer

Introduction:

One of the largest home and furnishing retailer headquartered in Canada, this company is ranked among top 200 websites in the world with annual revenue exceeding $100 million. It hosts over 100K products, which are catered by 1500+ vendors.

Challenges:

Since there was a requirement of multiple touch points with different stakeholders, a standard category wise procedure could not be formed for product groups and attribution. Here the primary challenge was to collate data from vendors in a timely fashion and provide an end-to-end solution equipped with deep category expertise.

• Unavailability of a consolidated process covering vendor coordination, item setup, publishing, and inventory management.
• Lack of set standards and category expertise to form product groups and attribution individual furniture parts.
• Unstructured vendor coordination process amounting to substantial delays and thus increase in time to market.
• Inability to scale up and meet the rise in market requirement and reduce the overall cost of production.

Solution:

Leveraging Iksula’s expertise in product data management processes and taxonomy, a dedicated team of experts was deployed combining product data best practices and technology automations to address the challenges. Top actions involved the following:

Vendor Coordination:

• Structured vendor coordination workflow and re-engineered process to ensure production is imitated after the full information has been procured.
• Templatized vendor communication ensuring ease of providing information.
• Set-up vendor no response reports to ensure full and detailed visibility to the buying team.
• Initiated vendor rating based on timeliness and accuracy of response provided.

Defined product grouping and attribution standards (on leaf level):

• Iksula developed detailed product grouping protocols for making product sets, kits, and master kits for each category.
• Set automated data normalization for mandatory fields (required for product comparison and search navigation).
• Ensured consistency of non-standard text fields for consistent viewing experience.

Deployed cross-functional teams across production processes:

• A team of category experts were trained and deployed on content sourcing, processing, publishing, and inventory maintenance process.
• Identified mechanism to capture and counter lead balancing issues across all production activities.