The Granite Group

Headquartered in New Hampshire, the Granite Group is a full-service wholesaler that distributes plumbing, heating, cooling, water, and propane supplies across New England.

Visit them at: Thegranitegroup.com

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Using Akeneo to Enrich Product Data on Online Store

The Granite Group offers a wide range of plumbing and propane supplies, including 45 wholesale branches and 15 retail showrooms for decorative plumbing fixtures and accessories for bathrooms. In 2016, The Granite Group launched an online portal that enables their core customers to manage their orders online.

The Granite Group needed a product information management (PIM) system to enrich their product data for their customers. They chose Akeneo because it is compatible with their online portal. In 2020, they worked with C2 to implement Akeneo and distribute rich product content to all of their digital channels more quickly.

“Our PIM project went very smoothly. We recently surveyed our customers, and 90% said the Product Information on our eCommerce platform was better than our competitors. I couldn’t be happier with where we’ve ended up.”

Matt Spangler, VP, Pricing & Product Data, The Granite Group

The Challenge

The Granite Group faced challenges while managing product catalogs with more than 80,000 SKUs, with up to 4,000 new products being added each year. Identifying gaps in product data and enforcing data governance was mostly manual involving spreadsheets. Their assets were stored in different locations with no easy way to maintain them. They conducted a thorough analysis of PIM solutions and ultimately chose Akeneo. As a partner of Akeneo, C2 helped with PIM implementation while providing eCommerce, infrastructure, and integration support.

The Solution

After implementing Akeneo, The Granite Group has a more visible and centralized asset management system, and can now prevent products from going live before they are ready. With Akeneo’s intuitive user interface, they can now train non-technical marketing staff to export product data as needed. With C2’s support and training, the core implementation was completed on half of the budget. After a few short months, The Granite Group already spun up more content to their website than all of 2020 and their catalog will be complete and fully governed by the end of 2021.