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into hierarchies and deliver hot product data via catalog which will be bought a heck of a lot faster than irrelevant, out of date product information.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

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

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

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

How to Improve E Commerce Site Search

January 26, 2012 Leave a comment

Take a look at your product data. Is your product data classified with customer-friendly categories and taxonomies? If not introduction of parametric search or navigational techniques will fail. First things first; clean data, govern data. Productivity is ratcheted way up by organizing and managing your product data first. Tremendous benefits will be obtained in the longer run.

Please get your Executive summary right here. This Executive Report, “Accelerate your Site Search with Better Product Data,” can be had for Free by just submitting this simple form:

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

E Commerce & Product Information Management

January 26, 2012 Leave a comment

Product information management solutions are much more than a product data repository or central product data base. Take a look at this vendors offering:

PIM: central repository for product information.
DAM: Digital Asset Management
Syndication: Product information publishing to e commerce, print, ERP, partners like Amazon, Google, Ebay and more.
Workflow: Process flow to alert and notify users when changes are made to product catalog.

The first three are offered by most MDM for Product providers. Vendors like Heiler and Riversand. The workflow engine is not integral to these vendors data model. It is an off the shelf OEM’d product bolt on. And the magic of real time data driven portals?

Most vendors do not provide the magic juice, a portal framework. This framework, a content management infrastructure, creates portal based applications to leverage that leverages product data. Here are just a few usages of a Portal Framework:

Supplier Portals: Supplier self-service for product upload, product updates and edits. Role based access to supplier product data.

E-Commerce Sites: product information is posted from live data sources to web. Absolute real-time accurate product date presentation to customers for purchase.

Print Portals: Distributed sales force and sales channels customize marketing materials with Web to Print.

Dealer Portals Product information is presented to dealers, e tailers and retailers, accurate and real time.

Portal Framework usage can increase the payback of a PIM or product information management solution. Make sure your vendor has this ability.

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

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