boohoo is ditching its legacy ERP system and replacing it with new Product Information Management (PIM) technology.

PIM is an application that brings together the collection and management of product information so that a product catalogue can be created and distributed across sales and e-commerce channels.

The new tech, provided by Akeneo, is designed to improve speed to market.

The previous system gave boohoo limited control over its product data and data governance.

“A big ethos of the business is ‘fast’ – fast in terms of spotting trends, developing new products and going to market,” said Will Clayton, head of innovation at boohoo. “Using Akeneo PIM, we now have a single source of truth for all product data and that not only gives great speed, and more consistent and better-quality product information, but also affords us the flexibility across category and product type within our portfolio of brands.”

The innovation lead said that now on a standard day the company can create 60,000 Stock Keeping Units (SKUs) and 300,000 during peak periods.

“[We invested in PIM because, before] everything was manual,” said Steven Nolan, technology director, boohoo Group. “We had nothing around mastering our products and were hamstrung by the manual processes that were in place.

“...our buy teams, it would take them up to 10 minutes to raise a product and create a product in our old systems, whereas now that’s gone down to 30 seconds to be able to create a product, so [we’re seeing] huge efficiencies and huge savings for our business now.”

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