The art of meeting customer demands
As the largest consumer electronics specialty retailer in North America, Best Buy is no stranger to exciting new product launches. When vendor partners debut the latest cutting-edge technology – whether it’s a new smartphone, video game console, or the latest wearable technology – Best Buy is working hard behind the scenes to showcase them for consumers, both in its stores and across its digital channels.
In the midst of this high-stakes environment stands Stacy Aase, the associate director of product management and marketing technology at Best Buy. She plays a pivotal role in ensuring that the tools used by Best Buy teams to launch new products on digital channels operate seamlessly.
The main challenge Aase and her team face lies in rapidly delivering content across multiple channels to market these groundbreaking events. “We were in a situation where we didn’t have the time or the resources to continue to meet the rising demands of iconic launches. So, we had to find a solution that could help us automate, streamline, and make our overall processes more efficient,” says Aase.
Navigating the maze of manual processes
Traditionally, managing the content and assets for such large-scale launches at Best Buy was a daunting task. Hundreds of product SKUs (stock-keeping units) needed images to be uploaded and stored with metadata. SKUs are critical to keeping track of inventory and sales. Each SKU is a code that represents a different product, acting as a unique identifier in inventory systems. While products may look the same to the customer, each variation of a new smartphone, from color to storage volume, would have a different SKU in the system. For each iconic launch, Aase had a team dedicated to meticulously creating the images and applying metadata for each product SKU one by one, with no room for error. At that time, the team needed four people working 15 hours to manually input around 280 SKUs at a time.
“A lot of the process was manual and took a long time. We would get product information, and it would take us weeks to get all the content together,” Aase says.
The team also relied heavily on a physical hard drive to store and transfer these crucial assets. “We literally had people running hard drives around the building,” says Aase, “which was not only time-consuming but also posed serious security risks.” Workflows would come to a complete standstill based on who had the hard drive at what time.
While Aase and her team work diligently to manage the immense workload of each iconic launch, they needed a way to get personalized product information out to customers quickly while cutting back on the labor-intensive processes going on behind the scenes.
A new era of content management
The transformation Best Buy experienced with the introduction of Adobe Experience Manager was game-changing. Adobe Experience Manager Assets centralized all content and turned what was once a tedious, day-long task into a swift, efficient operation.
The challenge of getting hundreds of product images ready for the website and manually matching those with over 200 SKUs was immense. “When we talk about uploading images, all the different SKUs, and getting the content up on our website, it used to take days. Now, with Adobe Experience Manager, it takes literally hours,” says Aase. This dramatic shift in efficiency is like night and day. With Experience Manager, a process that involved a team of four working tirelessly for 15 hours to upload hundreds of SKUs is now managed by a single person in just 2.5 hours.
“With our new workflows, the team can upload one image, highlight all the different SKUs, and press a button. Then the system does the rest. It creates all those different images that are needed and runs in the background while they can focus on other things,” says Aase. This isn’t just about saving time — it’s about unlocking a new realm of possibilities. With Experience Manager, Best Buy has enabled the “create once, publish everywhere” philosophy and can now swiftly adapt to market demands, showcasing a myriad of products with accuracy and speed which was previously unthinkable.
