PIM. Product Information Management. Sorry for brining yet another three letter acronym into discussion today. PIM stands for a discipline to manage data about products available outside of the company. Here is Wikipedia description:
Product information management or PIM refers to processes and technologies focused on centrally managing information about products, with a focus on the data required to market and sell the products through one or more distribution channels. A central set of product data can be used to feed consistent, accurate and up-to-date information to multiple output media such as web sites, print catalogs, ERP systems, and electronic data feeds to trading partners. PIM systems generally need to support multiple geographic locations, multi-lingual data, and maintenance and modification of product information within a centralized catalog to provide consistently accurate information to multiple channels in a cost-effective manner.
Kalypso article Viewpoints on Innovation Is Your Data Holding You Back? Product Information Management for Retail brings a topic of PIM importance for retail industry. It explains about omnichannels business model, leveraging “big data” and making data available across multiple channels and business initiatives. Article recommends building central data repository for product information as well as integrate and streamline all processes related to product information. Here is a passage from the article.
Integrate and streamline all processes that relate to product information. For most retailers this means integrating all the processes that have to do with setting up items in a given system. There are three that are the most important – product development, merchandising, and eCommerce. Integrating and streamlining these processes will remove duplication of work, and improve communication and efficiency.
Build a centralized repository for all product information. Product information lives not only in product development, merchandising and eCommerce systems, but also in the warehouse management system, marketing systems, and even in ad hoc desktop databases such as Microsoft Access and Excel. Creating one centralized location for all product-related data ensures a single version of the truth that all functional groups can access.
The story about PIM importance in retail reminded me about latest purchase on Amazon. It was a sofa for kids playroom. Nothing special, but it came disassembled as most of furniture you buy on Amazon. Sofa itself had special plastic feet assembled for transportation purposes. Feet were packed separately. Package itself supposed to have also screws. The picture below shows you product assembly guide. Screws were absent and the number of screws specified on the picture is wrong. In addition to that, mounting positions for feet and construction of feet clashed (it was wrong welded). Until Amazon sent a set of missing screws, I was trying to find more information about the products, screws and mounting online. It wasn’t very successful. You can easy get part number, but to find more specific information about mounting was not possible.
The example above is not unique, in my view. The information about products is often missed online and on e-commerce website. It is hard to identify products and find relevant information that you are looking for. These days is directly translated in bad channel performance and customer satisfaction. One of possible steps to improve it is to bridge product development systems and information systems supplying product data to outside world. Think about product documentation, manufacturing identification (like Part Numbers) and many others. The information about products typically stuck in engineering department, variety of databases and excel spreadsheets. To bring it online in a structured way can be an interesting opportunity.
What is my conclusion? Correct product information is a huge power to improve everything from sales to support and maintenance. With growing online sales in both B2C and B2B domains, it becomes absolutely important to maintain correct online information. CAD/PLM/ERP systems are primarily source of this information today and it is still very hard to get right information and bring it to business users and customers. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
