ETIM North America announced that Rastro AI, an AI catalog operations provider for manufacturers and distributors, has joined the ETIM North American chapter of the global product classification standards organization.
With a leading-edge enrichment application and PIM solution, Rastro AI enables manufacturers such as Endress+Hauser to launch their catalogs faster and deliver exceptional product and customer experiences with their trading partners
Rastro also serves distributors and retailers, including two Fortune 1000 companies, among them ADI Global, helping them restructure their data from multiple suppliers. Their cloud-based platform connects more than 420 manufacturer sites, with over 1M products created in a time to market 2x faster than average, improving data completeness and accelerating sales.
“ETIM North America facilitated a pilot project for us to test and demonstrate our application with one of their manufacturer members, Anamet Canada,” states Baptiste Cumin, CEO and Founder of Rastro AI. “We were able to classify their products, just under 1K SKU’s, to the ETIM North America English translation of ETIM v10.0 in 30-minutes.”
John Richardson, President of Anamet Canada, was amazed at the outcome. “By taking our spreadsheet of products, combined with many of our PDF spec sheets and brochures, they were able to quickly extract all the important information on our products and map them to the ETIM classes, features and values. They produced an online result, where they highlighted the places that needed our additional expertise, identified what matched, and also what was missing from the model. As a member of ETIM North America, this made it easier for us to contribute as Product Experts to their initiative to build up ETIM to represent the products in North America.”
“Distributors in North America have been asking manufacturers for years, to send their product data in a consistent and structured format, and some want it to be in the ETIM standard, which for some manufacturers could take months to build by hand. We take the heavy lifting off their hands and help them put it in their distributors’ hands,” added Baptiste. “ETIM is a widely adopted global standard, and we see the value it brings to the wholesale electrical industry and associated verticals around the world, so we wanted to help manufacturers and distributors in North America also realize the cost savings and value that adopting ETIM can bring them.”
“We are pleased with the outcome of the pilot project and thrilled to welcome Rastro AI as a Solution Provider Member of ETIM North America,” commented Mary Shaw, Executive Director of ETIM North America. “Their support will help with the expansion and adoption of the ETIM model across North America,” added Mary. “Their applications will help both manufacturers and distributors structure their data, and categorize it, while implementing the standardized ETIM descriptors to improve their online product discovery, accelerate their digital commerce initiatives, and support AI applications that utilize product data.”
Mary further commented, “I’ve had manufacturers ask for recommendations to a service provider that could assist them with mapping their products to the North American English translation of the ETIM standard. Rastro has shown, with this pilot, that they can accomplish this for a manufacturer, and I know they can do it for a distributor too.”
ETIM North America is a collaborative process where manufacturer and distributor members contribute to define product classification standards that drive our industry forward, while contributing on a global stage. It is through the advocacy and support of solution providers who utilize the ETIM standards to support their customers, that the benefits of ETIM will be realized as they will drive the electrical industry’s digital transformation.
To learn more about ETIM North America, its Product Expert Groups, and how manufacturers, distributors, reps, and service companies can participate, visit www.etim-na.org or contact Mary Shaw at mary@etim-na.org.
About Rastro AI
Rastro AI builds AI agents for catalog operations in manufacturing and distribution. The platform maps supplier data to any taxonomy, enriches missing fields from manufacturer sites and spec sheets, validates quality, and delivers outputs in the customer’s exact format, with connectors to PIM systems including Salsify, Akeneo, and Stibo. Customers include ADI Global and Endress+Hauser. For more information, visit www.rastro.ai or follow us on LinkedIn.