Union Coop

The Client

Union Coop is the largest consumer cooperative in the UAE, operating a network of hypermarkets, shopping centers, and online retail services. Known for its extensive supplier base and high-volume marketing activity, Union Coop relies on fast-moving, on-brand creative content to support its campaigns and retail promotions across its growing retail footprint.

The Situation

Union Coop wanted to turn its fragmented asset chaos into a governed, scalable content operation that supported marketing, trading and supplier collaboration. Specifically, the company wanted to:

• Centralize assets, moving 2TB+ from Magento and distributed drives into a single, governed DAM.
• Replace manual approvals/email chains with an auditable, role-based two-stage workflow.
• Improve asset discoverability by standardizing metadata so assets can be easily reused across channels, including the CMS, marketing platforms, and mobile apps.
• Reduce duplication and misuse, and establish auditability and operational transparency.
• Facilitate scale, making it frictionless to onboard future campaigns and external vendors.

The Challenge

Different audiences had different needs: Marketing needed on-brand assets fast. Trading needed reliable, traceable approvals. Suppliers needed a way to upload without accidentally releasing unvetted files. But no one was getting what they needed; instead, they dealt with scattered files, accidental duplicates, email threads for approvals, and no single source of truth. That meant missed deadlines, wasted creative time and governance risk.

Specific challenges included: 

• Mass fragmentation: Assets existed across personal drives, shared storage and Magento. Finding, deduplicating and deciding what to migrate required careful discovery and governance decisions.
• Large volume + tooling: Migrating 2TB+ at scale was tedious.
• Metadata complexity and platform edge cases: Union Coop’s needs pushed the DAM configuration to its limits.
• Workflow licensing and integration gaps: The Workflow App is an add-on, and its metadata limitations created integration complexity between the approval and asset management systems.
• Supplier participation: External vendors needed a secure upload path that respected approvals and auditability.

The Solution

Acquia partner, Axelerant, acted as Union Coop’s implementation and consulting partner for the full Acquia DAM program. Axelerant configured the Acquia DAM and the Workflow App, designed metadata & taxonomy, supported bulk migration, implemented a two-stage approval workflow, modeled roles and permissions, validated the migration via duplicate reports and QA runs, stabilized launch readiness, and delivered editor/vendor training and runbooks. Additionally, its team worked directly with Union Coop and Acquia through the project lifecycle to ensure the DAM aligned with governance and operational needs.

The teams took a phased, governance-first, practical approach to the project. They started by mapping every asset store, documenting file types, and designing a metadata taxonomy that would serve search, filters and legal needs.

Next, they tackled migration and validation, provisioning S3 buckets and executing bulk migrations with Acquia’s tool. They also ran duplicate scans and implemented two-stage approvals in the Workflow App to ensure assets reach the Asset App only after sign-off.

Additionally, Axelerant:

• Modeled uploader, approver and admin roles so everyday users can request but not release content.
• Implemented a practical metadata handoff pattern to address Workflow App/Asset App metadata gaps.
• Delivered launch readiness, runbooks and hands-on training to marketing, trading and supplier groups so the DAM would become Union Coop’s valuable operational tool, not a consultant’s artifact.

Acquia DAM provided the enterprise-grade Asset App, a Workflow App for approvals, and the Bulk Migration Tool for large-scale ingestion. Combined with Axelerant’s migration playbook and governance design, the solution turned a tactical asset lift into a sustainable operating model. 

The Results

The operational transformation was measurable. A marketing lead who used to spend an afternoon searching for a hero image now finds an approved, campaign-ready asset in minutes.

A trading approver no longer chases emails; they review requests in the Workflow App and confidently release only approved material. 

Since adopting Acquia DAM, Union Coop has realized numerous benefits, including:

• 100% centralized repository: All legacy assets are consolidated into a single, governed Acquia DAM instance, replacing scattered drives and Magento exports.
• Governed, multi-stage approvals with zero bypass risk: The two-stage workflow enforces approvals and prevents accidental releases; audit trails and notifications make the process transparent and auditable.
• Significantly faster cycles and fewer duplicates: Bulk migration, duplicate scanning and metadata validation materially reduce duplicated assets and shorten the approval/release lifecycle; Union Coop reports measurable reductions in approval time and higher governance confidence.
• Improved discoverability and reuse: Metadata standardization and upload profiles increase metadata consistency and searchability, allowing marketing and trading teams to find assets faster and reuse them across channels.
• Operational scale for vendors and campaigns: Role-based modeling and onboarding runbooks allow external suppliers to participate safely without bypassing approvals — making future campaigns and vendor onboarding significantly easier.