Why Do Companies Need a PIM?

Consumers require appropriate and accurate product information before making a purchase. For most manufacturing companies, this information consists of product specifications and descriptions, including texts, pictures, and videos. To meet this requirement, sales and marketing teams must collaborate to ensure all product information is consistent and accurate.

The process of achieving this is what is referred to as Product Information Management (PIM).

How Does Product Information Management Work?

Product information management is a system or process that helps companies collect, centralize, enrich, and manage product information in a single location. It enables companies to streamline the process of distributing, standardizing, and overseeing the delivery of all company product information required to market, sell, and service their products to their various sales channels and customer endpoints. Here’s how it works:

Data Collection

PIM begins with data collection or data entry, and most PIM solutions are adept at collecting product data from various sources such as manufacturers, suppliers, and internal teams. This extensive array of product data covers fundamental elements, such as SKUs, model data, product visuals, specifications, and safety warnings, while also accommodating more intricate details, such as marketing descriptions, narratives, manuals, and guides.

Data Centralization

PIM allows you to store diverse product information in a centralized location. Centralized product data creates a single source of truth for your product data, making it easier to manage and update, increasing sales and marketing effectiveness.

Data Enrichment and Quality Control

With a PIM solution, you can enhance company product data by adding attributes, categories, and relationships. This improves the quality and completeness of your product information. You can also implement data validation and quality checks to ensure accuracy and consistency by identifying and correcting errors or inconsistencies in the data.

Data Standardization

PIM allows you to employ standardized data formats and terminology across your product listings. This is crucial for multichannel marketing and e-commerce. It also helps to define roles and responsibilities for data management and establish workflows for data approval and updates.

Analytics and Reporting

With analytics and reporting, you can gain insights into your product performance and customer behavior. Some PIM solutions allow you to set up marketing and sales alerts to inform your teams when modifications occur, enabling them to promptly adjust their materials and actions or redefine their roles with product performance.

Integration

Connect your PIM system with other enterprise systems, like digital asset management (DAM) and Digital Experience Platform (DXP), to ensure data flows seamlessly and efficiently throughout your organization.

What Are the Key Components of a PIM?

The best product information management software offers functionality for storing and managing your product data and digital product assets with built-in digital asset management functionality. This shows that a PIM software solution is just one part of a successful PIM strategy. However, it’s important for companies using PIM to focus on the following key components:

• Quality content: Ensure your product information is consistent across sales channels by continually improving product information within your PIM system.

• Content targeting: Customize your product content in the PIM for each brand to match the target audience.

• Content accessibility: Ensure that all product information is stored in the PIM and that all staff are educated on how to access it. Without comprehensive data in the PIM, employees may resort to creating hard-to-navigate spreadsheets or documents for product information.

• Content governance: Ensure that all product information on your PIM is secure by allowing only designated employees to update product information.

Why Do Companies Need a PIM?

Many manufacturers still rely on spreadsheets and scattered file folders across the company network or individual hard drives to store and organize their data. This approach is cumbersome, to say the least. It hinders the effective management and timely updates of product information on several platforms, unlike with a PIM solution, where several product information modifications can be made with a single click.

In e-commerce companies, the challenge is more glaring. As your company expands, so does the complexity of managing prices, labels, and product descriptions. This makes the manual organization of your product information tedious and costly. Also, without a cohesive system facilitating data exchange between sales, marketing, and customer experience teams, adapting to product changes becomes challenging, resulting in an increased risk of disseminating inaccurate or outdated information to consumers. This underscores the necessity for manufacturers to adopt PIM software and leverage the overarching PIM benefits.

What Is an Example of a PIM?

Many PIM software companies have produced PIM solutions that are widely available in the market today, and the competitive environment is ever-evolving. While some of these PIM tools in market specialize in PIM solutions exclusively, others offer digital experience creation capabilities in addition to PIM solutions. PIM software examples that are more widely used include:

• Salsify PIM

• Acquia PIM

• InRiver PIM

• Plytix PIM

• Pimcore

• Lumavate

Each of these solutions offers the ability to centralize the management of product data. Salsify offers a solution facilitating streamlined product information management, seamlessly integrating with the development of business processes like go-to-market activities, while Plytix serves as a collaborative platform tailored for small to medium-sized businesses, emphasizing efficient product management. Inriver presents a customizable, multi-tenant solution designed for comprehensive product data management.

Best PIM Software 2023

If you’re in the process of evaluating PIM solutions for your manufacturing company, Lumavate stands out as a top contender. 

Lumavate’s PIM software offers exceptional data centralization and organization capabilities, making it a top choice in the market. Beyond its core PIM functionality, Lumavate serves as a Digital Experience Platform (DXP) and offers a Digital Asset Management (DAM) tool specifically designed for manufacturers. Also, marketers can leverage the PIM functionality within Lumavate’s Product Experience Management (PXM) platform to oversee product data management while consumers can access digital resources, including product guides, created by using the DXP segment of Lumavate’s platform, seamlessly integrating data from PIM and digital assets from DAM. To explore Lumavate’s product information management system, take a tour now or schedule a live demo today!