Founded in Chicago in 1922 as the Utility Supply Company, Essendant started out with an office products catalog before opening a retail store in 1937. The company then moved into wholesaling office supplies and furniture, technology products and janitorial and industrial supplies in the 1950s.
Essendant has grown over the last century into a global logistics and fulfillment powerhouse, serving 30,000 partners with over 1,800 brands and 80,000 SKUs. It currently distributes to nine of the top 10 U.S. retailers, as well as operates its own ecommerce solution.
Challenges
Thorough modernization required to make Essendant future-ready
The team at Essendant needed to thoroughly modernize its information systems to improve customer and supplier experiences, deliver improved efficiency and prepare for future innovation and technological advances. Automation was also a must, and the means by which the company could speed up its processes, including adding suppliers.
Essendant’s disconnected, increasingly overloaded legacy systems were becoming a barrier for the company to get products to market. Essendant’s compliance, IT and marketing teams were spending a great deal of time executing workarounds to enable them to do their jobs. The systems included a B2B syndication platform that shared product information with Essendant’s top 50 retail customers, but other parts of Essendant’s systems were Access databases or Excel spreadsheets.
It was almost inevitable that product information was difficult for the company to import and then publish to its market-facing web pages and partners. Despite the best efforts of employees, the existing infrastructure inevitably led to long delays.
Core to this challenge was a legacy product information management (PIM) system, which took inputs from Essendant’s ERP, portals and content systems, outputting them to the company’s ecommerce platform. With the help of Stibo Systems partner Infoverity, Essendant looked to fully modernize its internal systems to both improve its day-to-day operations for customers and suppliers and prepare itself for imminent future growth.
Data modernization for efficiency
Unsurprisingly for a wholesaler managing a large volume of SKUs, a lot of the focus was on improving the efficiency of collecting, storing and presenting product information. In addition, Essendant needed to be able to incorporate other data sets as it merged with or acquired other businesses in the future.
There were several obstacles to modernization; six different systems vital for the company’s operation were aging, siloed and difficult to integrate.
Collating and publishing product information and descriptions for retail partners took up to a week to create – and with the legacy PIM system, this meant some updates only happened once a month.
Rescuing data from silos – and failing legacy systems
The systems Essendant used didn’t move data between themselves effectively, resulting in siloed data within non-integrated solutions that the team had to work around – inevitably affecting data quality.
Of further concern was the age of some of the systems, which created some problems for the two organizations to overcome. The supplier portal had been developed in-house and was not economical to update.
Finally, rapid advances in AI capabilities offered rich opportunities for Essendant and its customers – but only if the company could modernize in time.
To summarize, Essendant experienced the following challenges.
- Dated systems that couldn’t scale. Six isolated systems created inefficiencies and resulted in data silos.
- Data quality and syndication lag: Latency in the publishing process delayed product availability for up to a week. Data availability was inconsistent, and there was no single source of truth.
- Frustrating and complex supplier onboarding process that included multiple systems, inevitable delay and complexity – and thousands of customers.
- No single version of the truth: Without a single view of product data or information, scaling Essendant’s business, or taking advantage of the benefits of AI, was off the table.
Solution
Building a unified ecosystem with master data management
With the help of Infoverity, Essendant replaced the six existing outdated systems with a single master data management (MDM) solution: Stibo Systems Product Experience Data Cloud, which includes Product Data Onboarding, PIM and Product Data Syndication cloud services.
More importantly, the company had to focus on what it did as a business – distribution – instead of workarounds for IT problems.
The compliance, IT and marketing teams went from spending time supporting legacy systems to focusing on their roles, saving 50% of their time across the board. Supplier data onboarding efficiency rose by 30%, and publish-to-market latency was reduced 80%.
“Cloud modernization with industry standard contractual terms and conditions at a compelling, sustainable price point was critical for us. We're in the distribution business. So, this project really allowed us to focus on what matters: running our business.” Toni Green, Director of Content and Integrations, Essendant
The project was built on four fundamental pillars:
- Business modernization would improve product onboarding, customer experience and automate significant amounts of the company’s operations.
- Technical modernization aimed to consolidate the technology stack, replace on-premises technology with cloud-based applications, and streamline the regulatory compliance process.
- Identifying and leveraging the correct system integration partner – that partner of choice was Infoverity.
- Finally, Essendant wanted to make sure its data was prepared for the future – one that included AI adoption. To do that, it needed a solid data foundation, technical scalability and interoperability between applications.
"You can embed an AI solution within Stibo Systems and say, this is my data and I need a long description of 250 characters and a short description of 75 and I want three different versions of it – it works. That’s because, with Stibo Systems, the data is clean, we can leverage that to have a meaningful outcome for Essendant.” Toni Green, Director of Content and Integrations, Essendant
The new system, powered by Stibo Systems, enabled Essendant to achieve four key objectives:
- System consolidation: The project allowed Essendant to retire a legacy PIM, supplier and dealer portals, a digital asset management (DAM) platform, item maintenance, product association and B2B syndication applications, replacing them with a single solution, Stibo Systems Product Experience Data Cloud.
- Future-ready systems in the cloud: Replacing on-premises systems with cloud-based apps introduced flexibility and the ability to scale for acquisitions and catalog expansion.
- A single view of the truth: Data and content is published in real time via the Product Data Syndication cloud service, reducing delays in getting products to market, but also making it easier to plug Essendant’s data and content into new AI-enabled capabilities as they come online.
- Process automation: The Essendant team had resorted to manual input, cobbled-together Access databases and spreadsheets to get the job done. With Stibo Systems Platform for MDM in place, Essendant can now concentrate on its business goals instead of struggling with an automation gap.
“Our content team now manages one system instead of two for reviews and approvals. Our suppliers have one system for item onboarding and maintenance. We have reporting available now. Merchants can work with suppliers to see where the item is in the journey. Management now has dashboards at their fingertips to understand the whole ecosystem. We are well positioned operationally for the future.” Toni Green, Director of Content and Integrations, Essendant
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Outcomes
Escaping legacy – and an IT distraction – to prepare for the future
Essendant needed to improve its customer experience, reduce time to market and escape a legacy trap that forced it to spend too much time and effort across multiple teams to look after aging and incomplete technology platforms and applications. But it also needed to prepare itself for future challenges: integrating acquisitions, adding new product lines and enabling more routes to market and capabilities with AI.
By combining master data with AI capabilities, Essendant is now well on the road to automating the creation of product descriptions (including automating the process of stripping data from supplier PDFs and external sites) and product classification. Using AI and MDM, the company is now aggregating pricing information and performing cost analysis.
Infoverity helped Essendant achieve all of this by implementing the Stibo Systems solution. Essendant can now focus on its real business, not on the limitations of an aging technology stack.
