9 Akeneo Enterprise Edition Features

For ecommerce businesses looking to take advantage of a free solution for managing their product data better, Akeneo PIM Community Edition is an ideal starting point.

However, for enterprise level set ups and organisations with much larger product catalogues, the benefits of investing in the Enterprise Edition can expedite your product data management and provide a much more effective customer experience.

Akeneo PIM Enterprise Edition is packed full of features and functionality that can transform the way your team manages your product data.

Here are just 9 key capabilities that you can take advantage of…

1 – Advanced Rights Management

Managing your product data through a PIM should streamline the entire process and create a collaborative and easy to monitor method of creating enriched product information. As such, ensuring that user permissions are assigned accordingly reduces the risk of errant data being published.

The Advanced Rights Management feature in Akeneo’s Enterprise Edition allows project owners the ability to create different user types with varying degrees of access rights. This effectively creates a hierarchy of users, restricting access to more junior members and allowing users with more experience to authorise amends and suggestions.

2 – Versioning and Publication

With multiple users given the ability to work on a project at any given time, creating an audit trail of amendments and revisions is incredibly important to both team members and end users to ensure that the most accurate data is published.

The Versioning and Publication feature in Enterprise allows team members to revert back to previous revisions of the same data set should it need to be replaced, perhaps after an error is discovered, and provides the ability for users to work on editing product data whilst the current version remains published.

3 – Rule Based Automated Field Population

The rules engine allows users to expedite the product enrichment process by creating settings and workflows to automatically apply changes to products if specified conditions have been met.

Multiple rules and conditions can be created and set by a user and as all enrichment rules are executed automatically the product enrichment process is eminently more manageable and scalable.

4 – Validation Workflows

The validation workflow allows users to create or edit product information in a collaborative fashion, giving users with higher access rights authority to review, amend and approve changes made before publishing.

This streamlines the entire approval process as teams can work remotely through the cloud based system and reviewers can edit or suggest news changes to product information without the need to reject and wait for the users to submit all over again.

5 – Product Asset Manager

Managing assets, particularly images, can be an arduous process for data managers and given how crucial quality imagery is in the decision process for a potential customer it’s not worth taking a shortcut.

The Product Asset Manager feature within Akeneo Enterprise Edition allows users to upload assets directly into the application and generate transformations automatically. This could include automatic resizing, thumbnail generation, changing the image resolution, image scaling or amending the colour of the space surrounding an image.

Transformations can be automatically carried out during mass imports and to help save memory with the Akeneo application assets can be stored and recalled from external servers.

6 – Teamwork Assistant

The Teamwork Assistant allows for the creation of new product enrichment projects and gives admins the option to assign specific users to work and collaborate on them.

Progress of the project can be tracked through the ‘Project Completeness’ widget which appears on the dashboard and provides insight into individual contributions from the team.

Another added benefit of the Teamwork Assistant is the option to determine the size of the project, to allow team owners to prevent creating projects that are too large for the capacity of the product enrichment team.

7 – Reference Entities

With the Enterprise Edition of Akeneo, reference entities allow users to link products that share common features or attributes and streamline the product enrichment process.

Each entity can be comprised of several attributes to ensure that all data required is present. For instance, an entity titled ‘Brand’ may consist of a unique company ID, a company logo, boilerplate copy and a country to provide all relevant information in one record.

8 – Single Sign-On

For users who access and manage multiple Akeneo applications the single sign-on feature is an incredibly beneficial perk.

Users can access multiple applications using just one set of credentials and can also create an Identity Provider, allowing higher level users authority to verify other users’ identities and grant or deny access to the relevant applications.

Should any errant activity arise, the single sign-on feature can be disabled quickly reducing the risk of any security breaches.

9 – Franklin Insights

With such a high degree of detail amassed by enriching large scale product catalogues, it can be hard to view the bigger picture and identify trends or opportunities for further optimisation.

Franklin, Akeneo’s built in AI-powered data intelligence assistant, helps users towards a more compelling product experience by providing insight into potential improvements by referencing over 50 million product records across its growing product library.

Users can purchase credits to take advantage of Franklin Insights on a product by product basis, allowing you to only target on your most important lines or on products which require the most attention.

As Akeneo PIM partners, iWeb can help you consolidate all of your data into one easy to use solution. Better product information means more purchases and fewer returns.