Data Onboarding

The ability to publish complete, normalized, enriched data begins with versatile and powerful data onboarding tools that foster collaboration throughout the product lifecycle.

Each Agility implementation comes with a unique set of variables: where the source data currently resides—multiple ERPs, spreadsheets, or text files—and the degree of cleansing and normalizing the data needs. With Agility, the current state of your product data is no speedbump to integration. Agility PIM’s Data Integration (DI) toolkit easily pulls data from disparate systems and formats and, in the process, can perform a variety of optimization functions to blend, correct, harmonize, categorize and remove redundancies in the data.

Agility DI is an easy-to-configure platform with the sharpest ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) tools and a WYSIWYG interface. It provides connectors and protocols to smooth communication and integration with dozens of standard systems — Microsoft Excel & Word, SQL, Oracle, SAP and far beyond – while enabling data validation and quality checks along the way.

For example, data inconsistencies like Large, LGE, and L can be normalized into a single value, trademarks can be added universally and consistently, units of measure can be converted or added for an international audience, and even errors within text strings can be detected and corrected. No matter the starting condition of your data, Agility’s onboarding process puts you on the fast-track to commerce-ready product data.

Agility PIM helps companies take a giant leap toward a more efficient process by consolidating your product data from historic siloes and putting it in an easily-accessible-from-any-browser, central repository, where a cross-functional team can participate and support your process. Our award-winning Agility Modular Interface (AMI) gives you role-by-role access and control to expand the universe of people who can participate in product data enrichment, review its progress and approve it for publishing.

Give vendors and suppliers secure logins to enter and maintain their product information, reducing time to market, rework, and cost while improving data quality.

Agility is configured to give vendors the best possible on-boarding experience, with a flexible approach that can be tailored for every company. Each vendor can be granted different access rights and privileges, dependent on process stage – for example, read-and-write rights early on; read-only later. Or, vendors can self-generate spreadsheets of relevant product categories to populate which are quarantined in a staging state until approved for upload into Agility.

Either method allows vendors to participate upstream in the content optimization process to advance their offering and keep product attributes updated throughout the product lifecycle. This access relieves the workload on distributors and retailers who are typically not staffed for content optimization. PIM Managers can use the Agility Data Integration toolkit to establish automated rules, data ranges, and thresholds for upfront quality control of supplier data to keep content teams small and nimble. Merchandisers and Category Managers can be freed up to plan better promotions and deliver more business benefit.

Onboarding your data into Agility PIM unifies the people, processes and technologies behind the management as well as the creation and delivery of product marketing content. Empowered with automation and collaboration, you can streamline processes, reduce manual internal effort, and get the most value out of small or over-allocated teams.