How improving data quality helped boost productivity at The Chef’s Warehouse
“Pimberly has been awesome in not only improving the quality of our data, but also making it more accessible.”
Digital Product Manager, The Chef’s Warehouse
22
Key Markets
+ 60,000
SKUs
2,000
Suppliers
Enhancing Customer Experience and Expanding the Portfolio with Pimberly
The Chef’s Warehouse, a specialty wholesale food distributor, has been serving restaurants, hotels, country clubs, and fine food stores across North America and the world for over 35 years.
Prior to Pimberly, The Chef’s Warehouse was facing challenges with their data cleanliness and the access the internal teams had to their data. The bulk of their product data was siloed within an ERP system, making it difficult for multiple teams to access and update the information. Since joining Pimberly, however, the data management capabilities have opened up so that a lot more people can view and enrich data coming from the ERP system.
One of the most significant improvements The Chef’s Warehouse has seen has been in the handling of product image management. Previously, images had to be uploaded and then individually assigned to products, a process that was incredibly time-consuming. Pimberly’s DAM streamlined this by enabling bulk uploads.
Since joining us at Pimberly, The Chef’s Warehouse has seen a boost in their productivity, and much-needed ease brought to their data enrichment.
Improving product data accessibility
With their data managed solely from an ERP, The Chef’s Warehouse found that an ongoing enrichment project would require collaboration across multiple teams within the company. Data needed to be accessible and visible to several teams. For example, had the Merchandising team wanted to tag items by season or holiday affiliation, this would have required creating a new field in the ERP. Given that not all team members had access to this system, this would have required more lead time and cross-team communication.
Now, with a centralized repository of data, Pimberly has helped The Chef’s Warehouse to expand accessibility, giving more people the ability to view, organize, and enrich the data coming from the ERP. This improved enrichment not only makes items easier to find internally but will also help them provide more relevant content for their customers.
“The support we have had from implementation up to today has been stellar. We approached Pimberly recently with our need for assistance in setting up Product Data Sheets, and the level of support we had was honestly incredible.”
The Chef’s Warehouse
Dealing with discrepancies and aligning product information
The Chef’s Warehouse manages an extensive portfolio of over 60,000 SKUs and when handling data from a vast network of suppliers, product information can massively vary.
With their data coming from an ERP, a handful of override workflows were set up in Pimberly to allow quick and easy corrections to any data discrepancies. If product names or descriptions coming from the ERP are unclear or not customer-friendly, (e.g. the color labelled as ‘GRN’ rather than simply ‘Green’) the information can be amended in Pimberly without losing the original value from the ERP. This process can either be done at the product level or in bulk using an Excel spreadsheet.
One application is related to region and country of origin data. For example, if an item comes in from the ERP with a country of origin value like “New York,” this can be updated in Pimberly such that New York is the region of origin and United States is the country of origin.
Additionally, after identifying a recurring need for a more efficient flow when an item is replaced by a different SKU (e.g. if 2 packs of 12 Coca-Cola cans are replaced by 4 packs of 6 Coca-Cola cans, the customer is getting the same amount of product but under a different SKU), Pimberly has enabled The Chef’s Warehouse to begin working on an automated flow that transfers relevant product information from the old SKU to the new SKU.
These workflows have been a helpful safeguard in The Chef’s Warehouse data management and a great boost for their productivity.
Easily Import
You can quickly import data into Pimberly from multiple sources in any form. The platform can connect to all your supplier, manufacturer and data feeds in minutes. You’ll see faster product on-boarding with less work!
Centrally Manage
Pimberly manages all of your product information, attributes and assets. Dashboards give a clear view of completeness across product ranges, and with the power to handle unlimited SKUs, Pimberly grows with your business.
