How Ultimate Products Streamlined Global PIM Operations, Saving 9,000 Hours Annually
Ultimate Products, a U.K.-based company with an international presence and heritage homeware brands such as Salter and Beldray, was experiencing growing pains in its product information management as it scaled its more than 6,500 parent SKUs and around 20,000 product variants across nine countries and seven languages.
According to Anthony Pole, process development director, it created a significant coordination challenge for the organization.
"A product may need different content, language and channel requirements while still being managed as part of one controlled process," he tells CGT. "From my perspective, the priority is to make that complexity manageable, so the business can expand its range and reach without relying on an ever-growing amount of manual administration."
Ben Gilmore, senior process developer, says that at an operational level, product information was spread across more than 30 spreadsheets, shared drives and email chains. Different teams maintained their own versions of the same information, which created duplication, delays and a greater risk of inconsistency.
For teams working with product data, Gilmore says scaling means maintaining a large volume of attributes, images, copy and market-specific content that must be kept complete and consistent.
"We had capable teams and good information, but too much organizational effort was being spent moving information between systems, checking versions and coordinating activity across departments," Pole says. "From a process development perspective, that was a clear sign that the operating model needed to evolve."
As a result, the company sought out Salsify in 2025 to provide a central structure that could support future automation and AI-led capabilities. The platform manages product information and prepares it for the retailers and marketplaces where Ultimate Products is sold.
Driving Business Transformation
Historically, a number of activities relied on individual knowledge and informal coordination, according to Pole. By using this new model, the company gained clearer ownership, improved visibility and found a more consistent route through the product lifecycle.
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The company built nearly 700 workflows covering activity from initial product creation and the allocation of SKUs and bar codes to content approval and channel readiness. Ultimate Products is also using AI capabilities to help generate alt text, first drafts of product copy and translations.
"We did not treat this as a software implementation. It was a business transformation program that required teams to agree on common processes and, in some cases, let go of established local practices," Pole says.
The integration was not without its challenges. Ultimate Products had to go from zero to 200 employees onboarded within a year. The team had to continuously explain the purpose of the change, respond to practical feedback and reinforce the new way of working.
Gilmore says there were also challenges around transferring modeled workflows into real-life situations, which required working through exceptions, approval points and dependencies with the teams involved.
"We also had to decide where automation was appropriate and where a person still needed to review or make a judgment," Gilmore says. "That detail is important. A workflow only creates value if it makes the process easier to follow without removing the controls the business needs."
The Advantages of Data Consolidation and Automation
Pole says the most important benefit is that the organization now has a more scalable operating platform for growth. It helps the company prepare to expand its presence in international markets while leveraging the same underlying content, governance and processes instead of creating region-specific workflows for each new channel.
"That capacity can be redirected toward activity that needs judgment, creativity or closer customer focus," he says.
So far, Ultimate Products has experienced an 11% year-over-year increase in Amazon conversion rates, contributing to an estimated $2.9 million in incremental Amazon sales.
On a day-to-day basis, Gilmore says the organization has removed small manual steps that previously occurred thousands of times. He cited removing manual SKU and bar code allocation as a prime example.
"Rather than someone opening a spreadsheet, identifying an available code and copying it into another record, the workflow can allocate it automatically when the product reaches the relevant stage," he adds.
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Similar efficiencies include creating draft content, managing translations and publishing to Amazon marketplaces.
"Each improvement may save a relatively small amount of time on one product, but across the full catalog, the cumulative effect is substantial," he says.
Pole estimates that the implementation saves around 9,000 working hours each year. In the fourth quarter of 2025 alone, 4.4 million automated workflow tasks were completed.
Getting Started With PIM Optimization
For organizations interested in taking a similar journey, Pole suggests beginning with the outcome and the operating model, not the feature list.
"Be clear about the problem you are trying to solve, who owns each stage of the process and how success will be measured," he says. "Centralizing information is useful, but the larger benefit comes from simplifying the work around it."
He also emphasizes that governance and adoption infrastructure should be embedded from the start to account for competing priorities, changing processes and new opportunities as teams begin to use the platform.
"A clear decision-making structure helps maintain direction, while continued engagement ensures the new process becomes the normal way of working rather than an additional system people have to navigate," Pole adds.
Executives should also spend time with the people who perform the process, and design around what actually happens, including the exceptions, Gilmore says.
"Start with high-volume activities where the benefit can be seen quickly, but build the workflows so they can be improved over time," he says.
A critical part of the process is keeping human review where it adds value. Ultimate Products treats technology as the enabler, keeping its primary focus on business outcomes rather than the software itself.
Gilmore says its use of AI is a good example. "It accelerates the first draft and repetitive elements, while defined approval steps maintain oversight. That balance has helped us gain speed without compromising control."
Finally, Pole says a key step is linking each capability to a clear operational or commercial need so the program remains focused on value rather than becoming a technology implementation for its own sake.
