Product Information Management (PIM) — a system for all types of products
What is PIM?
Product Information Management (PIM) system is a tool that centralizes and organize all the information about your product. In other words, it is a system that contains all the marketing-related information about products. It supports workflows and processes for integration that improves the product information enrichment.
PIM system lets you centralize and re-use product assets and information and create a digital twin.
Product data during the whole life cycle has a great impact on the efficiency and quality of the sales process and finally on the relations with customers.
In order to manage this process, there are various solutions, ranging from storing data in an Excel database to more automated multifunctional systems.
Once you decided that your company needs one centralized source of information — you will definitely look for a PIM (Product Information Management) system.
A central source of data
The PIM system centralizes and organizes all the information about your product (all the marketing and technical information). It supports workflows and processes, builds an integration endpoint, improves the product information enrichment and provides complete product information to potential partners and customers.
Data distribution
The product data is collected and enriched by many people within the company and as a result, the quality of information is dramatically improved.
The PIM system is a central place for consistent data distribution to other applications like websites, online catalogs, e-commerce (B2B, B2C, B2X), product configurators, product selection tools, printed materials.
What is the business value of the PIM system?
The PIM software allows making your sales and marketing team focus more on data quality and minimize the time for repeatable activities. It reduces constant and manual data entry work makes the search for products easier and provides up-to-date product inventory information.
Vertical fluency with data journey across domain interfaces.
In most companies, the central data point starts in ERP systems. The goal is to centralize and re-use product assets and information in every organization department to build one trusted point of the data.
More about functional module set for PIM and PDM systems 👇
Typical software ecosystem for sales of technical products
Enough for basic products:
- Item number
- Symbol
- Name
- Static price
PIM required for advanced products:
- Basic +Versions
- Technical data
- Measurements
- Spare parts
- Accessories
- Dynamic price
PIM is required as an extension to ERP and CRM to manage and distribute Information about advanced products.
What is a typical product data lifecycle?
Product Information Management system enables the most efficient data management workflow in just one place
The PIM system helps you to collect data from many sources and enrich it by many people in one central system. Support marketing and sales and dramatically improve the quality of information used in multiple channels.
Collect (data acquisition)
- Connection to every possible data source
- Handle specific formats and locales
- Normalize the data
- Processing measurements and diagnostics from laboratories
- Automate as much as possible
Work (enrich)
- Create and edit all aspects of product information
- Use data linking, dynamic lab data, and batch tools to make the work effective
- Store assets in a media bank for reuse and easy access for editors & translators
- Create data requirements by using templates and validation
- Handle editors and translators from all over the world with country-specific locales and a flexible permission system
Distribute
- Access product data from every point of the product life cycle
- Support customers with historical data
- Export specific data for different channels (web, DTP, mobile app)
- Control information published for various markets and languages
- Design permission-based product life cycle with scheduled actions
- Deliver data
