Product Management Agility

April 19, 2012 Leave a comment

Imagine sorting products into hierarchies. Hierarchies being a set of products to sell to a vertical or specific customer. How do you do this today? Do you have parent child relationships, a family view of product lines, ability to enrich products? Is your hierarchy management system scalable? Say today or next month new products or new suppliers come on board. Are more folks needed to manage the new lines the increase in SKUs?

Sure you do, you and 20 colleagues skip through spreadsheets, copy and pasting fingers to the bone,am I wrong? And then searching for an image or several images pertinent to products and product assortments. And where are the videos, maybe hazmat information, documents, pdfs, delivery restrictions?

Delivery restrictions are interesting. Take a rifle scope seller. Best not deliver that night vision scope to China. Or gun powder to California and on and on. And on to labeling products, packaging to your business requirements and to your regulatory needs.

Filed under product catalog, Product Information, Product Information Management

Print Catalogs: Alive and Well if Done Right

April 19, 2012 Leave a comment

Done right means published with the customer in mind. I am a hunter and a big hunting supply company knows this. Catalogs, rich with hunting products, appear in my mailbox each month. And this is OK. However, I am a bow hunter, a traditional bow hunter, and 90 % of the catalogs sent to me, at high cost, just do not pertain to my needs.

Then another hunting, shooting business sends me, once a year, this huge mail box stuffing book. With this big book of products, tons of products, is another smaller catalog. The smaller catalog, just a bit skinnier than the big book, contains new products. Why is this?

Because catalog production is akin to having a baby. Conception, to delivery takes nine months or more and many new products arrive during the catalog creation process. What to do? Add another catalog with new products. Silly at best, time consuming, sales killing painful at worst.

Now with modern technology can segment customers, segment products into hierarchies and deliver hot product data via catalog which will be bought a heck of a lot faster than irrelevant, out of date product information.

Filed under print publishing, product catalog, Product Information

Beware MDM Product vendors

March 16, 2012 Leave a comment

Selecting an MDM vendor is like picking a path through a Falujian mine field. Broken bodies abound. Over promising vendors with over drawn bank accounts being two biggest causes. Simple Dunn and Bradstreet analysis will expose the weak sister MDM software vendors. And consider not one or two references. Ask for five. Five sounds high, but wait till your weak sister PIM vendor lifts the veil of respectability transforming into a one or two hit wonder right before your eyes.

Filed under MDM for Products

Product Information and Data Silos across the Enterprise

March 12, 2012 Leave a comment

Product information resides on several systems across most large, complex organization. Over time ownership of product data changes. The product development team often uses tools to which no access is provided to sales, marketing and operations. And when a product is developed and read for sale manual efforts will then build attributes for customer use. Taking a look into the future the product is changed, edited and then discontinued. All efforts eat time and money due to manual efforts.

PIM or product information management, leading edge solutions, get, cleanse, transform and enrich product data fast. The best solutions use powerful workflow engines making product lifecycle management simple. A solid pim solution is a must have for manufacturers, distributors, retail and e-commerce enterprises. Product data, the life blood of any business, is made accurate, up to date and presentable to customers. The manual efforts are converted to governance of key processes. Alerts and notifications keep all owners of data and consumers of data, including ERP, CRM and data warehouses, all on same page.

Filed under e-commerce, manufacturing, MDM, MDM for Products, Product Information, Product Information Management

How Big is E-commerce Industry

March 12, 2012 Leave a comment

@invespBlog posted a visual representation of how e-commerce sector grows by double digits year to year. This post is an infographic, or pictorial view of interesting facts about the e-commerce industry; growth and trends.

Please see here: http://www.invesp.com/blog/ecommerce/how-big-is-ecommerce-industry.html

Filed under e-commerce, ecommerce

Is PIM the same as MDM?

February 2, 2012 Leave a comment

Answer is no. PIM is not the same as MDM. Correct is PIM is a part of MDM as in MDM for products. Master Data Management is a big picture, boil the sea data management prospect. PIM or product information management is a get it done, high value approach. In many business cases, product information is super critical to sales, and customer satisfaction. And, PIM or product information management, a part of the MDM road map, is a fine first step on the MDM path .

Filed under MDM for Products

Product Catalog Publishing to e Commerce Sites

January 31, 2012 Leave a comment

Back in the day a business put out a “Big Book” product catalog once a year. And some businesses just put out the same catalog year after year, with manual, painful edits made by staff. ( I am working one project now and catalog has not been updated for 6 years.)

And more and more complexity bubbles up each day. Each day because new potential sales platforms pop up. Names like Amazon, Ebay, Google, and many, many more that can sell your products if you can hand them the product data.

And EMEA too. Getting product data in multi languages, with cultural flair, to offshore partners is not a snap, for most marketing folks. Mary Kay comes to mind. Biggest new markets are China, Russia. This I have been told. I wonder how many folks are transforming data to usable Chinese format?

And I ask to think about how fast markets change. How new entrant web sites are up in moments. How old school business fails. Just think about this.

Filed under catalog, ecommerce, ecommerce software, etail, MDM for Products, Product Information

What is MDM?

January 27, 2012 Leave a comment

What is MDM?

Master data management, or MDM, is a set of processes and tools that defines and manages master data. This is non-transactional master data. MDM’s goal is to collect, aggregate, transform, consolidate, govern and distribute data within an organization to ensure consistency and to govern on-going data quality.

Filed under MDM, MDM for Products Tagged with

Product Information

January 27, 2012 Leave a comment

Product information resides in many enterprise systems and supplier systems. Product information managers have a big job getting all product information clean and usable. Business applications and graphics programs and marketers, merchandisers, product managers lap tops hold key product information. And with product information changing often managing product data is almost impossible.

Project information management, defined, is a series of processes and technologies, working together, to ensure product information is accurate and most important, usable to all that need it. Creating a central repository for product information is a first step. All product information, or product truth, can be synchronized with systems, business users, and partners. This central repository can cleanse, store and enrich product information. Marketers, merchandisers and product managers are on the same page.

Product information, residing in a central repository, can be leveraged faster for catalog publishing, web content, trading pools, customer support and internal operations.

Filed under MDM for Products, Product Information

Product Information Management & Enterprise Applications

January 27, 2012 Leave a comment

The enterprise is chock full of product data applications. Product Lifecycle Management, ERP, CRM, are just a few applications holding product data.

Each application has a valuable role in an enterprise product information strategy. This brief overview summarizes what Product Information Management solutions do and explains how PIM fits and strengthens existing business applications.

Please get your copy of Product Information Management & Enterprise Applications right here:

Filed under ecommerce, MDM, MDM for Products, Product Information

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