What Is PIM Used For?
by Lumavate | Last Updated: Dec 20, 2023
by Lumavate | Last Updated: Dec 20, 2023
Your company may use a warehouse to store its physical products, but how does your business organize the massive amounts of product data? If you still try to keep track of your inventory with spreadsheets, you'll inevitably miss information and fall behind as better-organized competitors seamlessly create delightful product experiences.
You need a product information management solution to ensure that you have complete and organized data on all your products. Can a PIM improve your company's operations? Yes, find out how below.
Every individual product your company produces and sells has numerous data points. This information includes product categories to aid your marketing department, pricing and SKUs for salespeople, and replacement parts and user manuals for your service personnel. Incomplete information for any aspect of the product can cause lagging sales and poor customer service, which translates to lost revenue for your company.
PIM, or product information management, offers a solution for handling the vast amount of data associated with marketing, selling, and servicing your company's products and creating a central site for it.
Any authorized employee in your company who needs product data, can readily access complete, accurate information with a PIM. Additionally, multiple employees can contribute to the information, ensuring that the data for each product is complete.
A PIM is part of a total product experience management (PXM) package. This comprehensive package includes everything you need to organize, manage, and make use of product data. A PXM allows you to create product catalogs, text customers, and maintain consistent branding across your product line.
Whether you sell directly to consumers or other businesses, you need a PIM to handle your product information to make your operations more efficient and profitable.
Does everyone in your company know the branding and product data for every item you sell? No human can memorize such vast amounts of information. Nor can you trust every department in your company to have the same branding for products unless you create a single place for branding and product information.
This is where PIM products come into play. These solutions give you a much more robust means of organizing information than outdated spreadsheets. With PIM products, you unify your entire company by providing a single place for all branding and product data for everything you sell.
So, you know that PIM is a centralized source for product data, but does your business need it? Some companies once could get away with using spreadsheets to track product data in the 1990s. However, this only worked before the rise of digital commerce. Today, selling anything requires having much more information available. Your old spreadsheets won't cut it when it comes to keeping track of product information.
Too often companies that use spreadsheets may have separate sheets for marketing, sales, and service departments stored in different folders on the company's network. With this system, no department would have a complete picture of all the product data they may need. Additionally, separate files all need updating when adding new products or changing existing item data. The process adds more time and effort, and costly mistakes can happen.
When you convert from spreadsheets to a PIM solution, you may wonder why you didn't make the change sooner. The perks of a PIM solution for your business include:
Centralized product data accessible by all authorized users
Improved product data management
Location to store product images, files, and videos as parts of the data
Integration with product experience management solutions
Means of creating and maintaining brand consistency
The ability of users to access and manage product information
Thanks to the demand for easily accessible product demonstration videos, PDFs of user manuals, and digital images for online sales and catalogs, your old spreadsheet system will no longer suffice. You need a more robust solution to act as the central source for everything about each product you sell.
With so many PIM tools in market today, you have multiple options for handling your product data. The dizzying number of PIM software companies include:
Lumavate PIM offers multiple functions including Digital Asset Management (DAM) and Digital Experience Platform (DXP) to make handling product data for your e-commerce site simple and comes as part of a total PXM solution.
Salsify PIM works best for shops through Facebook and Instagram.
InRiver PIM does not offer DAM as part of its PIM, but it does have a smart image recognition system, which facilitates the rapid population of product tags, descriptions, and colors for multiple items.
Plytix PIM is a solution for small to medium-sized businesses that depend on omnichannel marketing. Its PIM includes DAM capability.
Catsy PIM merges a DAM into the PIM to make the most of digital assets.
Akeneo PIM is an option that includes task and project management with its product information management system.
Pimcore PIM offers an open-source community PIM solution, enterprise option, and cloud-based software for handling product data.
All the above options offer a way to centralize your product data. With so many choices, how can you choose which of these PIM software examples has the attributes you need?
While each company likely cites itself as the best PIM software 2023 has to offer, Lumavate should take that title. The myriad of functions for its PIM includes both DAM and DXP. These attributes allow your business to do the following:
Categorize your products based on type
Create and show product relationships to each other to recommend cross-sells and bundles, which can drive up revenue
Enjoy limitless product handling
Allow anyone in your company access to the PIM without user volume limits
Integrate the PIM solution with your existing data to produce a single, unified source of information
See changes made to product information from any user in the company
If you have a need for better data management for your products and a way to get everyone in your company on the same page when it comes to product branding, you need a PIM in your business now.
Find out for yourself how Lumavate's robust all-in-one functionality can improve your business. Book your demo today.