The new supplier catalog just landed. 4,000 articles. Who's typing those in?
Nobody. Syntact reads catalogs and price lists in any format, maps the articles to your article model, matches them against your article master, and writes them to your ERP and PIM for approval. Your team reviews — instead of typing.
"Please find attached the new SS26 collection incl. price list. New articles available from week 4, RRP adjustments on around 800 existing articles — see attachment for details …"
Your supplier already has the data. Your team enters it again anyway.
Not because your data team is slow — but because between the supplier format and your article master sits a media break that people have been bridging by hand. Every season, every catalog.
The new catalog arrives as a PDF, the price list as an Excel file — and then someone spends weeks creating articles: attributes, units, cost price, RRP, product group. Thousands of times. And next season, all over again.
A misplaced decimal in the purchase price, an outdated condition, a mixed-up packaging unit: the article keeps selling normally — just with a silent negative margin. You find out months later at year-end close. If at all.
The supplier can deliver today — but the article is only sellable once it exists in your system. Every week stuck in the data entry backlog is revenue for the competitor who created it faster.
Matching columns, converting units, guessing product groups, debugging import errors: your best people in purchasing and e-commerce spend days on mapping files instead of on assortment and conditions.
A wrong cost price never costs just one typo.
Manual product data maintenance has two built-in costs: the weeks it always takes — and the silent errors it regularly writes into your article master. Both grow with every catalog.
A shifted decimal, cartons confused with pieces, an old attribute copied along — in the data entry marathon, nobody notices. The article carries the error into the shop, the price list, and every order.
A wrong purchase price doesn't trigger an error message. It just keeps selling for months — on every order, in every channel. Product data errors are the most expensive kind, because nobody reports them.
If the new items only go live when the season is already running, the supplier's lead time was wasted. Whoever creates the article first sells first — data entry decides that, not marketing.
The same article created three times, attributes sometimes maintained, sometimes empty, units depending on who typed them: every manual import makes the dataset worse — and every report built on it less credible.
What does article creation cost you — the cost nobody questions?
A conservative calculation: pure article creation time only. Margin lost to wrong cost prices, revenue lost to late listings, and the cleanup cost of duplicates aren't even counted yet.
Approve catalogs instead of typing them in.
No supplier portal, no mandatory format, no re-educating your suppliers: catalogs keep arriving the way they arrive today. Only the data entry is taken over by AI — embedded in your existing system landscape.
A PDF catalog, an Excel price list, Datanorm, BMEcat, or the attachment in a supplier email: Syntact monitors the intake — nobody converts anything, nobody builds mapping files. Catalogs with 400 articles or 40,000.
The AI identifies articles, attributes, units, tiered prices, and variants — and maps everything to your article model: your product groups, your attribute sets, your units. Existing articles are recognized in the master instead of created again, and missing attributes are enriched with their source.
Your team sees the finished import as a proposal: new articles, updated prices, flagged exceptions — next to the original source. Approve, and the data is in your ERP and PIM. Weeks of data entry become hours of control.
Approval stays with your team: no article lands in the master without the okay of your data owners. The AI proposes — people decide.
Import tools need clean files. Syntact turns any catalog into clean data.
Extracted rows that nobody has checked against your article model, existing data, and price logic are only half the journey. The approved article in your ERP/PIM is the goal — everything before that is an intermediate step.
PDF catalogs, Excel files in any column logic, Datanorm, BMEcat, attachments straight from email: Syntact reads whatever your suppliers send — instead of you re-educating suppliers or maintaining a mapping file per format.
Everything is mapped to your product groups, attributes, and units — not to a standard schema that someone has to bend back into shape afterwards. Your data logic stays the reference, not ours.
Every article is checked against your existing data: EAN, supplier article number, description. Existing articles are updated instead of duplicated — the master gets cleaner with every import, not worse.
Syntact fills missing attributes from the catalog and other supplier documents — and shows where every value came from. No silent guessing: every enrichment stays traceable.
The AI proposes — people approve. An unclear unit, a suspicious price jump, a possible duplicate: flagged and put in front of your team for a decision, with the original source right next to it.
Syntact is not a PIM replacement and not another data silo: Akeneo, Pimcore, SAP, Dynamics, or JTL stay in the lead — Syntact is the supply layer that finally feeds them reliably.
Your ERP/PIM stays. Syntact fills it.
Catalogs come from the inbox, articles land in your ERP and PIM — via API or standard interface, with your article master as the reference. No system migration, no additional data silo.
We build missing connectors for free — contractually guaranteed. Compatible with anything that has an API or an import format for article data.
Product Data Pilot: your first supplier catalog fully in-system — in 14 days.
A pilot on your real catalog intake, with your article model and your team — on terms where doing nothing is the most expensive option.
If your product data pipeline isn't running in production after 90 days, we keep working for free until it is.
You pay no platform license as long as the pilot isn't in production. The risk sits with us.
Catalog intake, article model mapping, and your approval workflow — set up for you, not sold to you.
90 days of direct access to the person building your use case — no ticket system, no call center.
If the pilot doesn't go to production, you pay only half the implementation.
Missing an interface to your system? We build it for free — contractually guaranteed.
The mechanism is already running — at real customers, with real data.
This exact use case runs in production at McSHARK: product, pricing, and logistics data from the most diverse sources, harmonized in one semantic data layer — with ROI from the very first use case. Syntact is the AI foundation platform for enterprises: one foundation for every use case, operated in the EU, all the way to on-premises.
- Catalogs, price lists, and the article master in one semantic data layer
- Permissions & audit log at every level
- After product data: order intake, invoice checking, knowledge assistant — same platform
"With Syntact, we successfully unified all our product, pricing, and logistics data and achieved ROI from the very first use case."
30 minutes. Your catalog. A finished article import.
No slide deck: bring a real supplier catalog or price list — we'll show you how it becomes verified articles. On your data, not on our demo dataset.
- Feasibility on your catalog intakeA live demo based on your catalogs — formats, edge cases, everything.
- A concrete 90-day pilot planSteps, timeline, and what we need from your IT (very little).
- Pricing in black and whitePlatform, implementation, guarantees — no surprises.
- An engineer, not a salespersonYou talk to the solutions architect who will build your pilot.
- What does automated product data onboarding mean?
- Supplier catalogs and price lists — as PDF, Excel, Datanorm, or BMEcat — are read and structured by AI: articles, attributes, units, tiered prices, variants. The data is mapped to your article model, matched against your existing article master, and written to your ERP and PIM for approval. Your team reviews and approves instead of creating articles by hand.
- Does it work with Datanorm and BMEcat?
- Yes. Structured formats like Datanorm and BMEcat are processed directly — including the cases where suppliers interpret the standard creatively. The bigger lever, though, is the unstructured formats: PDF catalogs, Excel price lists with ever-changing column logic, and email attachments that have no import path at all today.
- Our article model is special — variants, tiered prices, custom attributes. Does that fit?
- That is exactly what the mapping is for. During the pilot we define your target model together: product groups, attribute sets, unit logic, variant structure. Syntact maps every catalog to that model — not to a generic schema. Anything that can't be matched unambiguously is put in front of your team for a decision instead of guessed.
- Honestly, our data is a mess. Do we need to clean up first?
- No — the cleanup is part of the mechanism. Matching against the article master surfaces duplicates and gaps, enrichment fills missing attributes with their source, and every approval improves the dataset. Whoever waits for clean data before automating waits forever. It works exactly the other way around.
- What happens with duplicates and articles that already exist?
- Every article from the catalog is checked against your existing data — via EAN, supplier article number, and description matching. Existing articles are updated, for example with new prices, new ones are created, and uncertain cases land flagged in the review queue. The master grows in a controlled way instead of wild.
- How is this different from a PIM project?
- A PIM project gives your product data a better home — but it doesn't fill itself. Syntact doesn't replace a PIM and doesn't introduce one: your ERP or PIM stays in the lead, and Syntact automates the supply — from the supplier format to the approved record. If you already run Akeneo or Pimcore, this makes them more valuable, not redundant.
- And the difference to shop and feed tools?
- Feed and shop tools distribute product data that already exists in structured form — towards marketplaces, shops, or price comparison engines. Syntact works one step earlier: from the unstructured supplier format into your article master, with mapping, duplicate matching, and approval. Only once that step works do the distribution tools have something clean to distribute.
- The season is running right now — we have no time for a project.
- The pilot is built to run alongside your day-to-day business: our solutions architect sets up the pipeline, your team provides one catalog, a master data extract, and feedback in short sessions. And the best moment is right now — the catalog sitting in your inbox today will otherwise be typed in by hand again.
- Who do I need internally — and what do I tell management and IT?
- For management: one calculation — data entry hours per season times hourly rate, against a license from €800 per month that only starts once you're in production. For IT: little effort — a catalog intake (e.g. a mailbox), an interface or import format for your ERP/PIM, and a master data extract. Our solutions architect does the setup. And for both, there's the demo on your real data.
- What about data protection and our supplier data?
- Syntact runs GDPR-compliant in the EU — in your own cloud or on-premises if you prefer. Catalog, price, and article data stay in your systems, and access follows your permission model. We provide the documentation your data protection officer and purchasing department need.
- What does automated product data onboarding cost?
- The platform starts at €800 per month — and the license only starts once you're in production. Setup, catalog intake, and the ERP/PIM connection are included in the pilot package, and implementation is covered by the 50/50 guarantee. A single catalog with a few thousand articles costs more to enter manually than the platform costs in a whole year.
Not just catalogs: orders arrive as PDFs and emails too.
The same platform monitors your order intake and creates verified sales orders in your ERP — for approval, never behind your team's back.
Sales order automationThe next catalog is definitely coming. The question is who types it in.
Hours of review instead of weeks of data entry — and no more cost price silently eating your margin for months.