The Client

Top industrial distributors buying group in the USA

The Challenge

Our client came to us for an efficient and accurate automated onboarding solution, but ended up staying for a lot more. Over the years we have taken on multiple challenges, ranging from catalog data enrichment, quality audit and taxonomy management, to creating supplier versions of modules that would give our client’s suppliers a way to upload and view their data in enriched form. 

The challenges therefore can be categorized into:

1. Replacing a vendor who was manually onboarding product data in a slow and expensive manner, quality audit for all existing SKUs, and a plan for getting new SKUs into the system. Further, all attributes were to be validated and enriched following a set of stringent business rules and checks. 
2. Auto-classification into complex taxonomies at various high-level categories, including impact analysis for changes in taxonomy. 
3. Supplier versions of dataX modules that would enable our client’s suppliers to upload and review their data.

The Solutions:

Accurate and speedy onboarding and enrichment: 

We created a proof-of-concept to demonstrate the efficiency and quality of AI automation over the manual process. While our speed was impressive, it was the way dataX handled complexity that was the clincher. Our algorithms auto-classified SKUs into complex taxonomies with better-than-human accuracy. We enriched product data by adding global attributes, product titles, specifications and other digital assets, aggregating to more than 50 attributes per SKU. 

For new SKUs, we created an automated pipeline designed for smooth and speedy onboarding, with accuracy levels that required no or minimum human intervention. At the time of this writing, it is set to handle 600,000 new uploads and counting.  

Quality Audit:

We performed a thorough check on the entire catalog to check if all business rules were adhered to, and all industry standards followed, and the formatting was right, down to the last comma. We also audited the accuracy of classification, quality of attributes, and correctness of image formats and other digital assets associated with e-commerce data. Our modules automatically updated all those SKUs that required minimum fix, while those that needed a complete overhaul were brought to the attention of the client through detailed reports.

Complex taxonomy management:

We built a new feature in dataX to manage our client’s complex taxonomy structures. There were separate structures defined at each high-level category, which meant that each of these taxonomies would be maintained independently, and different versions at each of these hierarchies would also have to be maintained independently. 

Any change to taxonomy would potentially impact the catalog. dataX created an impact analysis tool that worked at 2 levels (a) An online, immediate assessment that returned an impact score indicating how severely the catalog would be affected; and (b) A detailed analysis that would let the client know the impact of the change on every individual SKU, down to attribute level.  

Supplier views:

Our dataX supplier version was designed to let suppliers upload their data for basic sanity checks and review before submitting to our client. It also let the supplier view their own data after enrichment on our client’s website.

The Result

All these solutions came together in the most satisfying way. Our client, primarily engaged in the buying business, were able to sign on more members, with larger catalogs, because of the automated pipeline doing all the work of onboarding and enrichment that maintained the data at industry standards. Their clients were happy because of the e-commerce services they had access to, which was completely enabled by dataX, and furthermore, tuned to optimal performance thanks to our enrichment, auditing and taxonomy management tools.