How Cisalfa cut the time to publish a product by eighty per cent

Overview

Cisalfa Sport is the largest sports retail chain in Italy, 240+ stores across eighteen regions and an online business that has to carry the same assortment. Its catalog is 250+ third-party brands, and it turns over with every season.

As the ecommerce operation grew, the constraint stopped being the assortment and became the speed of getting it live. Cisalfa came to us to take the manual exchange with suppliers out of that process.

The challenge

Product onboarding ran on what suppliers sent, and what they sent was uneven: attributes missing, descriptions missing, images missing, formats different for every one of them.

• Chasing the missing details by hand held publication up, supplier by supplier.
• The team reviewed, corrected and enriched every record before it could go out.
• New arrivals landed too late to catch the demand peak they were bought for.

How we solved it

The agents took the supplier file as it arrived and turned it into a publishable product, inside the process Cisalfa already ran.

1. Normalize. Whatever the supplier sends, spreadsheet, code list or images, becomes structured product data on Cisalfa’s own taxonomy.
2. Enrich. The missing attributes, specifications and descriptions get filled, so the record arrives publication-ready rather than half-written.
3. Fit the existing workflow. No new system for the team to learn and no integration project to run first.

What changed

Publication went from weeks to hours, an eighty per cent cut, and the team stopped writing product data. It reviews what the agents produce and decides what ships, which is the part of the job that needed people in the first place.