Agility

Agility is a PIM solution that has at its heart a flexible data model based around a relational database platform. It provides a full-function PIM offering, including multi-channel syndication, product onboarding, data quality capabilities, customizable workflows, analytics and reporting. It is similar to the architecture of large enterprise PIM solutions like Stibo but competes more at the mid-market level rather than targeting global enterprises. The product runs on Azure as a public cloud and can also run on private cloud on-premises, though the vast majority of its newer customers choose a cloud deployment. The product OEMs the Pentaho ETL tool, and this gives it pre-built connectors to a number of ERP products like Microsoft Dynamics and SAP. Agility also has native digital asset management.

Customer Quotes

“Agility is a fantastic product, with a great team of people behind it.”
Andrew Parkhouse, Operations Director, Axminster Tools

“Agility has enabled us to not only greatly improve completeness, but also time to market by 60%. And, Agility’s analytics and export tools have enabled greater cross-functional collaboration, reducing workload in the PIM team by 80%.”
Malcolm Travis, Product Information Manager, Sparex

“The improvements we made with our product content in Agility has allowed us to shorten the production cycle time.”
Claire Edwards, Head of Marketing, ESPO

The company has a consulting and implementation services team and prefers to carry out customer deployments using this team rather than generic integration partners.

The company also has technology partnerships with a company called SiteLucent for digital shelf analytics, and QlikTag for digital product passports, which are gradually being required within the EU. These contain information about the materials used within a product, recycling instructions, safety information and environmental impact.

The PIM market is a $15 billion market, growing at around 15%, and Agility is exceeding this market average, growing at around 20% annually in recent years. Its large parent company gives it the ability to consider acquisitions in addition to organic growth. It spends a healthy 12% of its revenues on research and development, and this can be seen in the latest version of the product. This has a well-crafted user interface which allows for elaborate searching and filtering of products in the system, based on the open-source Elasticsearch engine. One of the most time-consuming aspects of PIM is the production of product descriptions, which need to be quite complete for many electronic marketplaces such as Amazon. Rather than relying on these being entirely written by customers, Agility has an AI generation facility that utilises ChatGPT (or other large language models) to be used to generate product description text. Unlike some other tools, Agility has designed an interface that accesses the PIM data and from this generates a tailored, highly detailed prompt from an extensive template. In this way the users are not just expected to have a free hand with a prompt interface; the product goes a long way to providing a carefully tailored prompt to generate a description of the desired length. This draft description can then be reviewed by a human being to ensure accuracy. Of course, large language models can hallucinate, but the very detailed prompt engineering used here minimizes this as much as possible, and also allows human review of the draft content. This is a good example of the research and development work that has been done in Agility, and is one of the better-engineered examples of this that I have seen.

The bottom line

The Agility software is a well-proven and mature PIM solution that can be deployed on public cloud, private cloud, on-premises or in a hybrid configuration. It has a flexible data model and extensive built-in PIM functionality. It also has a parent company with deep pockets and has been growing faster than the market average. Mid-market customers should certainly consider Agility for their PIM needs.