The advantage of having a PIM

What is the advantage of having a PIM?

PIM, acronym for Product Information Management, brings numerous advantages within a company. To understand them, let's first examine any product on the market (the pack of carpenter's screws, an appliance, a pack of pasta ...) and fill in a summary sheet. We can thus realize the numerous information to be entered. Here is an example of data:

• Identifiers: brand, item code, barcode, item name, short description, long description, notes ...
• Dimensional: height, width, depth, net weight, volume ...
• Versions: types of color, finish, painting…
• Order details: order measurement unit, minimum purchase quantity ...
• Aggregatives: series, line, model, product category, class ...
• Packaging: type of packaging, height, width, depth, weight, volume, quantity of product contained ...
• Prices: currency, price, validity start date, validity end date, territory of competence, etc.
• Associated products: type of correlation, article code, etc.
• Technical characteristics: depend on the type of product…
• Language: translations for different countries and markets

Are too many? They are only a few and if we try to imagine all the variables that can be for each single field, it becomes easy to understand how many problems there can be in their management.

This information is often stored individually, with personal criteria from different offices and departments. Sometimes they are even duplicated and one never knows for sure which is the definitive form, the one with the latest updated data.

No, we must equip the company with a Product Information Management system for the management of product information and with a Digital Asset Management for the management of digital resources (images, videos, attachments).

PIM and DAM operate with the same logic: they centralize the management of information and product assets to ensure that they are enriched and then distributed in multi-channel format.

So what is the advantage of having a PIM?

Product Information Management (PIM) can be said to provide more than one advantage, including the ability to:

• have a single corporate repository for all product information. The PIM is in fact able to connect to the systems already present in the company, find the various information, centralize it and thus become the company's single source of truth
• have complete data synchronization. By interfacing the PIM with the various systems already present in the company (ERP, management, file server etc.) you will be guaranteed that each department or external supplier will have the updated version of any information (data, image, video etc.) relating to a certain article
• guarantee greater safety. IT can manage and ensure adequate access to data. Permits are issued to each work group or individual user for read-only access or with the possibility of changing the data, creating new articles, etc.
• facilitate use and collaboration with intuitive interfaces: simpler access to data allows better management of all commercial / marketing activities

Being a collaborative platform, all company figures benefit from it:

CIO / Innovation Manager
The IT director needs homogeneous and centralized data, in support of his digital transformation strategy to achieve the objectives defined at company level.

CTO / Technical Director
It needs new technologies that are easy to implement, scalable, performing, which can be integrated with other software to improve the company's competitiveness.

CMO / Marketing Director
He wants to create personalized, engaging and satisfying digital and online shopping experiences through the effective and efficient distribution of content.

Marketing
The marketing area processes a variety of rich media content and needs to govern sharing with colleagues, partners, designers.

External and creative agencies
Photographer, graphic designer, illustrator, web designer, videomaker. For each of these roles a PIM solution streamlines the asset search processes, ensures the storage of multiple versions, facilitates review and approval, ensures quality and consistency of the brand image.

Project manager
Project management is enhanced in the agile assignment of tasks and roles, in the creation of deadlines and budgets, in addition to the expansion of the level of collaboration and sharing of responsibilities within a project team.

IT manager
It identifies the safest, most robust, scalable and high integration rate for this type of storage and sharing of the company's digital assets.

Our Product Information Management software allows marketing and sales to decline information quickly and accurately in the different distribution channels: printed catalogs, websites, e-commerce ... It allows above all to customize the information relating to product categories, prices, descriptions and translations. 

Contact us to find out more, to understand how PIM can configure itself with your company, guaranteeing maximum automation.