Intersport reduces new product data processing time with Unifai, an Akeneo company

Intersport has reported a 50% reduction in product data processing time, following its partnership with artificial intelligence platform Unifai, an Akeneo company.  

Founded in 1968, Intersport has 5,300 affiliated stores in 42 countries, including UK and Ireland, where it operates 270 outlets, as well as Europe, Australia and China.

Each store is independently owned and run, allowing it to "offer the best guidance and value for its products and services with an understanding of the local customer and community".

During its six annual buying windows, all brand partners provide product catalogues to its HQ, giving Intersport just one month to process and centralise all product data, which is then released to individual stores to place orders with suppliers.

Any delays to this process, which relies on fast, efficient and accurate product information management (PIM) processes, risks product records being created locally, rendering them unusable across several of Intersport's internal workflows, including web and auto-restocking, leading to manual interventions, inconsistent Product Experience (PX) and potential lost sales.

To ensure it has accurate and consistent product catalogues across all its internal and shopper-facing touchpoints, Intersport has been leveraging Akeneo’s PIM solution.

However, it recognised that to further enhance its PIM processes, it needed to automate the data classification process to achieve greater speed to market while guaranteeing the uniqueness of item codes on its network - "an essential requirement for budget tracking as well as sell-out and inventory tracking across its ecommerce operations and in-store".

To achieve this, Intersport selected Unifai, one of the most adopted of Akeneo’s suite of AI for PX apps and solution providers.

Previously, manually processing a catalogue of 8,000 products took Intersport approximately a week. Now it can be completed in 2 to 3 days, with some catalogues completed in just one hour, without compromising the accuracy of the data.

This frees up time for the data integration team and buyers to source new products and optimise the product mix, ensuring that its customers have the best selection of sporting goods available to them.

Fred de Gombert, Founder and CEO of Akeneo, said: "By integrating Unifai's AI/ML capabilities alongside Akeneo's supplier data onboarding solution, a typical customer can expect to achieve 50% time savings with 98% accuracy in data onboarding processes."