Why Product Information Management?

May 5, 2011 Leave a comment

Managing products is complex. And getting it right once often means little. In a blink, quality data turns sour. Duplicates, errors dirty pristine data. Dan Power writes in Information Management today about the value of PIM or a product information management solution. Please see here:

http://www.information-management.com/issues/20_3/why-product-information-management-10017882-1.html

Filed under manufacturing, Multi Channel Sales, PIM, print publishing, Product Information Management Tagged with

7 Must Knows before Investing in Product Information Management

May 3, 2011 Leave a comment

Implementing product information management or PIM for short, offers choices. Some are confusing. Focus on low hanging fruit is my advice. Here are 7 things to know:

  1. Find Vendor Expertise:  Vendors are good at demo gymnastics. When given a short time to demo, vendors can come up w/ stuff that looks good. Focus on references. Talk to companies that use and have been using the vendor tool to make sure. Trust but verify vendor speak and credentials.
  2. Seek and find Flexibility: Scalability extensibility are key. Map the vendor solution to existing business process and see how it shapes up. Avoid big bang deployments, Vendors’ speak “Holy Grail,” yet find a tool which can be phased, eating low hanging fruit first. Shed a brite lite on the data model. How flexible? Can hierarchies be built and edited? Can your existing data model be used?
  3. How Open is the PIM solution? : Old news. Proprietary vs. Open technology. Put straight, open is easier to adapt and integrated to apps being used now. Does PIM application use proprietary database? Is routes of PIM in catalog management vs. ecommerce? Find out.
  4. Data Sources and Where are they? : The biggest challenge to a PIM deployment are data migration and data integration. Learn all data sources. Map out flows, in and out. where are images? How is product data received and enriched to product information? Do this first or find a vendor that knows this stuff and will help map, on their dime.
  5. Detailed Statement of Work: Get details on precise PIM implementation steps and time frames. Important. Through reference details, learn what was promised by the PIM vendor and what was delivered. Beware low ball services estimates. Dirty trick is to low ball for favorable position and then to come back to well.
  6. Prove Value: Is vendor willing to contractually baseline delivery?
  7. Risk Mitigation: Is vendor willing to work on a pricing model to mitigate risk and to find ROI faster?

    Filed under MDM, Multi Channel Sales, PIM, print publishing, Product Information Management Tagged with , , ,

    Product Information Management Request for Information Guide

    October 6, 2010 Leave a comment

    Product Information Management for your Enterprise
    Enterprises that can quickly transform product data into rich, selling product information have competitive advantage over enterprises which still clean data manually.
    Transforming product data to rich, selling product information is key to delight customers and to keep sales healthy. Often, gathering product data from suppliers and internal systems to publish to ecommerce sites and to print is a slow, painful process. Retailers and etailers have many suppliers. And the market may change each day. Product attributes like price, color, size, availability, fit, capability, may change daily. And getting ecommerce changes done, can eat time and cost sales.
    If an Enterprise sells thousands of products into a fast moving marketing like apparel, electronics, and consumer goods, and if the product management process is slow and painful, a Product Information Management solution will offer high return on investment. Painful business processes like product edits, new product introductions, data governance and data enrichment are done using workflow in the best of breed PIM systems.
    Integrated workflow pushes work to designated users, using alerts and notifications, to speed business processes, to increase efficiency and sales.
    Now the request for information process, the beginning of PIM vendor selection is made easier. PIM-Data.com is offering a FREE RFI/RFP guide to all enterprises seeking a product information management solution. This guide is full of rich functionality detail describing best of breed product information features. This guide is built to serve as a starting point. Project teams can use this roadmap to save time and kick start the PIM selection process. All is included, General Instructions, PIM and Multichannel Publishing overview and all these chapters:
    Product Information Management
    Search
    Digital Asset Management (DAM)
    Multichannel Publishing
    Web-to-Print Portal
    Workflow Management
    Web Content Management
    E-Commerce
    Portal Framework
    Support questions, training questions and technology questions are Procovered with intelligent questions all seeking a PIM solution can use. Important vendor questions are also supplied plus a reference section. All a Project Information team needs is to apply this template to their business. Just ask for your Free copy in the comment field below this post.

    Filed under MDM for Products, Multi Channel Sales, Product Information Management

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