On February 6 and 7, 2019, the second edition of the Akeneo PIM Summit #APS2019 took place in Paris, bringing together a part of the Akeneo ecosystem over two days. During this event, we could meet more than 300 people including Solutions and Technologies Partners and Akeneo customers. thanks to theKjusproject realised with the companyUnic, we had the opportunity to attend to this event. We are pleased to share with you in this article a summary of the key elements that caught our attention.
The Experience Renaissance
The keynote began with Frederic De Gombert, dressed in Renaissance costume, CEO and Co-founder of Akeneo, who immersed us in the history of Benjamin Franklin and the creation of the “Junto” club in 1727. This club whose members came from a variety of backgrounds including engineers, mathematicians, botanists, chemists chemists that Benjamin Franklin chose, had for goal to meet and exchange on various subjects having for goal to improve the lives of citizens. The craze for this club was such that Benjamin Franklin had the idea to create the first library using the writings of the club members.
Frédéric De Gombert also insisted on the open source side of Akeneo and that it would remain as is.
During these two days, the theme of the event was “The Experience Renaissance”. Most of the topics discussed during the sessions and projects presented by existing Akeneo customers showed how Akeneo can make Julia’s life more how Akeneo can make Julia’s life easier (Juliabeing the fictional character created by Akeneo, who represents the user of Akeneo in his or her tasks of enriching products in a catalog. The second theme associated to “The Experience Renaissance” and which was strongly present, is the product experience, hidden under the acronym PxM for Product Experience Management. A subject that is increasingly present in PIM tools in order to stand out from the competition.
Two very good presentations demonstrated this, including the one by Joe Pine, who showed that today we are being sold a product experience and not just a product. A very specific example is the Starbucks coffee shop where the price of a single coffee is higher than the price of a classic coffee due to the experience provided during the purchase process but also during its consumption. It is the same with Nespresso coffees.
The second presentation was on the importance of the product experience, presented by Virginie Blot, Head of Professional Services at Akeneo. She made us aware that conveying an emotion through a product and the different ways to achieve it increases the probability of purchase and differentiates the company from competitors.
Product Experience Management (PxM) extends PIM solutions in one or more of the following capabilities:
- Product content analytics
- Personalization
- Contextualization
- Automation and optimization using ML/AI
- Source: Simon Walker - Gartner
How can akeneo position itself in the PxM segment? Quite simply by offering a suite of solutions in this direction such as OnBoarder, Akeneo PIM and Franklin.
#APS2019presenting@akeneopim3.0 including reference data as core feature, SSO, performance improvements, “ask franklin” exhttps://t.co/5ybKtg9o7h(service as API), Franklin Insights (integration of ask franklin into akeneo) for EEpic.twitter.com/plvzQ47Z1D
— Diglin (@diglin_)February 7, 2019
Akeneo 3.0
An event such as this one cannot miss the opportunity to present the new features of the new Akeneo 3.0 version. Available at the time of writing, they include: access to artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques thanks to Ask Franklin , Single Sign On, Entities References and general performance improvements.
Franklin (only on the Enterprise version)
Last year, Akeneoacquired Sigmento, an Israeli company specialized in Machine Learning for product enrichment. The result is a suite of solutions around artificial intelligence :
- Franklin: Accurate content library from trusted sources using artificial intelligence and machine learning. Particularly suitable for technical product data. This solution is currently available for the US market but should be available later this year for Europe and open to more data types.
- Ask Franklin: API allowing access to the Franklin library from a third-party application
- Franklin Insights: integration of Franklin from Akeneo
Nadav Ruppin explaining the new intelligence tool of@akeneopimto improve user and product experience, helping to reduce the time to market. It uses AI & ML to enrich product data. Currently for US market & catalog having huge data amount#APS2019pic.twitter.com/AjROEGRR96
— Diglin (@diglin_)February 7, 2019
Single Sign On / SSO (only on the Enterprise version)
Single Sign On uses SAML v2 technology and allows connecting Akeneo user accounts with different providers such as Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Active Directory, Google Suite or other SAML v2 compatible solutions. SSO provides a simple solution for a user to use the same username and password username and password that he uses within his company. If he is already logged in the company environment, the user will not have to enter his login and password again.
Reference Entities (only on the Enterprise version)
A Reference Entity is a piece of information attached to an attribute of a product. Imagine for example a product has a “Care” attribute and you want to give instructions about the product. Instead of writing these instructions for each product again, you define a Reference Entities and make the relationship with the product, so each product being in relation with the Reference Entities will be able to benefit from the attached instructions thanks to the existing relationship.
This feature was already existing in the Github akeneolab directory and was improved by the community of developers. It is still available for the community version of Akeneo but all the simplified management through a user interface is only available for the Enterprise version.
The Myer experience
Myer is the largest and oldest store in Australia. They have implemented Akeneo’s PIM in order to optimize optimize their internal processes. In particular, they accompanied their suppliers to obtain data from them in a simpler and more efficient way in order to import them into Akeneo. Myer also customized Akeneo to provide information in the Dashboard in order to take into account priority events or highlight the most important suppliers for product data enrichment.
Robert Schwab of Myer talks about why they chose Akeneo below:
Conclusion
To sum up, we met very nice people, shared enriching experiences, had a nice boat ride at the foot of the Eiffel Tower with a good dinner, took advantage of future opportunities and heard announcements that bode well for the future of Akeneo.
