Product Information Management for Marketers

Businesses, as time and growth moves ahead, can find their business systems cluttered with dirty or inaccurate data. Bad data can slow the progress of the company like sludge can cause an engine to stall. Dirty data can slow the sales process and the customer order process just because sales channels are quoting wrong product attributes. This leads to lost sales and a high rate of order and invoice errors which must be fixed at a cost.

Product Information, or the data describing and specifying a company’s products can be found in several systems at many companies with no easy way to aggregate or collect this product data. This data is not easy to manage and is made up of multi-media like images, audio and video, pictures, text, and integers all in various file formats. When product data is in different formats, different systems and in disparate applications it is very hard to work with. Product data is in the erp system, may be in a graphics tool like InDesign or Quark and can be salted across the company’s locations in isolated folders on desktops and laptops. This data, costly to create, is now more costly to use and will add little to the corporate intellectual property.