About the project
Context
In September 2025 I worked as Senior PIM Consultant for a US veterinary distribution platform. The company was preparing to expand from the US and UK markets into France, the Netherlands and beyond, and wanted a catalog foundation that would not have to be rebuilt for every new country.
The Challenge
The challenge
The catalog was organized around distributors. The same product existed several times, once per distributor, each copy with its own data to maintain. It is like keeping one address book per friend who knows you: every time you move, you have to update all of them.
With international expansion ahead, every new market would have multiplied those duplicates. The teams were not the problem. The model was.
HOW WE FIX ISSUES
What we did
- Designed an umbrella catalog: one central product model, with distributor and market specifics attached to it instead of copied into it.
- Defined the governance model that lets the business open a new market on top of that foundation, instead of rebuilding the catalog each time.
Result
The architecture was designed for a projected reduction of more than 50% in catalog maintenance, a faster market entry and a scalable international base. Duplication is a model problem, not a people problem. If your catalog multiplies products per partner or per channel, PIM vs MDM explains where each kind of data should live.
The Toolbox
Technology Stack
Akeneo
