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into hierarchies and deliver hot product data via catalog which will be bought a heck of a lot faster than irrelevant, out of date product information.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

Fast Growing Ecommerce Biz

January 25, 2012 Leave a comment

Hi, Working a new one here. Professional software salesguy, I am. Terrific 6 year old business. Fast grower, progressive thinker. CEO impressed the heck out of me with vision.

100 million revs and up I work. Admit the smaller more fun. The larger guys get cement shoes, slow to move, afraid to drown. Small, agile, quick to decide, there you go.

Problem is or, even better, the opportunity is, small get big and smart execs feel the IT infrastructure starting to chug like a car with miles hitting a hill. Time to get a new engine.

Back to CEO meeting at the gazelle company. All business software applications homegrown. Exec defines this as differentiated and he is right. Tech team is sharp as tacks and know what the business, marketers, merchandisers, product managers, need.

Right up against a wall now. Supplier counts growing fast and product numbers growing faster. Now is the time to look to packaged and configurable software products sitting in the MDM for PIM space. Master data management for products for Riolinda residents.

First need, to get Product data in one place. Very common pain. Marketers, merchandisers, product managers on point trying to hunt down images, docs, attributes, descriptions, etc. Just getting organized, getting data in one place in a proper taxonomy is a big win.

This is job one. Then job two may be optimizing print catalogs, faster, simpler product information syndication to partners, on demand ecommerce publishing and more…..

Filed under catalog, ecommerce, ecommerce software, Multi Channel Sales, print publishing, product catalog, Product Information Management Tagged with

Print Catalog Publishing for Manufacturers

November 16, 2011 Leave a comment

In my sales travels I come across print publishing pain. Just this week I met a harried marketing manager tasked with getting a new Big Book Catalog out the door. Sounds simple ehh? Yet the last product catalog was published 6 years ago. And product data like images, copy, attributes reside in several different systems and largely in the 6 year old catalog.

To learn how to put your arms around Print Publishing get this Free Guide: “The New Catalog Approach.” Get details on the below and much more….

How to keep catalog content current and error free.
How to synchronize catalog product content to all media.
How to create on-demand catalog content.
How to offer self-service catalog content.
How to customize all catalog content.

Filed under catalog, manufacturing, manufacturing sales, Multi Channel Sales, print publishing, product catalog, Product Information Management

New Product Introductions Real-Time, Really…..

September 21, 2011 Leave a comment

The Yankee Group has published specs on how better product information management benefits a retailer, manufacturer and or e-commerce business.

“Data Entry people, Product Managers, Merchandisers and Marketers can save 5,000 to 10,000 hours on new product work.”

This statement amazes me. Consider salaries/ wages paid to professionals managing product information 40 hours per week, over a year and compute the savings. This is savings just based on wages. New Product introductions speed to real-time. Invoice errors are slashed. Returns are slashed. Promotion errors down too.

I am a MDM for products professional and drink the Kool-Aid of benefits each day. Even with enthusiasm tempered, a PIM solution or product information management software solution is a must have in organizations that make, manage, sell, a high level of products.

Filed under PIM, product catalog, Product Information Management

Product Information Management Pain

September 21, 2011 Leave a comment

Often, in my travels, I run into marketing professionals in charge of catalog creation. Professionals, good at their job on the surface, yet mired in manual tasks to get a catalog, datasheet, brochure or whatever into usable condition. I feel for these folks. Days are jammed with time pressure, and reaching to people, to systems, to suppliers for the building blocks of a product catalog.

My step is light around these busy bee marketers. Light because automation or dynamic catalog creation, which a product information management solution may bring, may threaten some marketing professionals. Unease may be caused my automating the very tasks the people do. I try to share that more creative work can be done and better marketing strategies can be created if their valuable time is saved.

My approach is to question the workflow of the catalog creation process.

How do you get your product data?
Where is it stored, how about images, documentation, specs, prices?
How many people work on the catalog?
How long does it take to get to pre-press?
When catalog finally arrives, how much data is obsolete?

The obsolete question on the surface sounds silly but often is not. I recently visited a product information management prospect. This company produced a big book product catalog for customer use, and sent along with the big book, was a smaller catalog with corrections. Yes this is true. My question of what percentage of the “new big book” was obsolete got a 25% response. Obsolete because the catalog process took over 6 months.

More direct I was in my next question, “Why the heck do create your catalog, loaded with errors, like the way you do?

The answer was, “This is how we always do it.” I encourage these folks to pack a gun to the gun fight not a plastic knife. I give them a Paper on Dynamic Catalog Creation. Please get your free copy below:

Filed under catalog, print publishing, product catalog, Product Information Management

Product Information Management Software RFI Template

May 19, 2011 Leave a comment

Get a Free Product Information Management RFI Guide Loaded with Best Practice PIM Functionality.

Enterprises that can quickly transform product data into rich, selling product information have competitive advantage over enterprises fighting product data each day.

Transforming product data to rich, selling product information is key to delighting customers and to keeping sales healthy.  Often, gathering product data from suppliers and internal systems to publish to e commerce 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 e commerce 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. 

Product information management smooths business processes like product edits, new product introductions, data governance and data enrichment Best of breed product information management solutions contain workflow engines that power and improve business processes like product lifecycle management.

Integrated workflow pushes work to designated users, using alerts and notifications, to speed business processes, to increase efficiency and to increase sales.

Now you can speed up the vendor selection process. Base lining your product data requirements is done for you.

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 road map to save time and kick start the PIM selection process.  

Much information is given to you. General Instructions, PIM and Multichannel Publishing overview and all these chapters:

Product Information Management

Search

Digital Asset Management (DAM)

Multichannel Publishing and Syndication

Product data system integration

Web-to-Print Portal

Work flow Management

Web Content Management

E-Commerce

Portal Framework for marketers, sales teams and more…

Support questions, training questions and technology questions are covered 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. Please get your FREE copy right here:

Filed under catalog, data quality, ecommerce, ecommerce software, MDM, Multi Channel Sales, PIM, product catalog, Product Information Management Tagged with , , , , ,

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