What is a Product Information Management (PIM)
Product Information Management or PIM is a specialized system that enables an organization keep all information regarding a product in one place. It ensures that the likes of product description, product images, product prices, and product quantities are up to date and easily accessible. It increases efficiencies within companies in a way they can add and communicate such information on the website and catalog sales presentations and many more easily inflating the organization of the businesses in general.
Why Product Information Management is Important
Product Information Management is really important for businesses that sell products online or through multiple channels like social media and marketplaces. As businesses add more products and use more sales channels, it becomes harder to keep everything up-to-date. PIM solves this problem by organizing all the product information in one place, which helps improve customer experience and boosts sales. The PIM market is growing fast and is expected to reach $16 billion by 2025 because businesses want to reduce mistakes and stay competitive.
Importance of PIM for an Entity and Product
Despite being relatively new in most countries, PIM is becoming very important considering the increasing numbers of companies and resumed sales of products over the internet or through social platforms as well as marketplaces. With increasing product lines for a business and increase in sales lines, it becomes close to impossible to continually updating all the channels.
In case businesses do not have Integrated Marketing Communications techniques it tends to make it harder for the customers to find basic product information and increases costs. The PIM market is expanding rapidly with projected news of child reaching $16 million in the year 2025 because of the desire of business organization to reduce errors even as competition tightens.
What Are Some of the Key Features of a PIM System
All Data in One Place: Eliminates the hassle of scattered product data by making it possible to manage it from one location.
Extra Product Information: Complements information on the product with additional images, videos and all other relevant aspects.
Multi-Channel Distribution: Effectively maintains product information consistency across the multiple channels while communicating with the consumers.
Workflow Management: It provides endpoints on how product information is revised and sanctioned.
Data Quality and Governance: It ensures that product information is credible and well-defined within the industry.
The Benefits of Using a PIM System
There are also other benefits of using a PIM system. It raises the credibility of the product information to perfect level all the abnormality in the selling avenues and hence minimize errors. This makes such activities as entry of data and updating of the information less time consuming and efficient.
PIM totally minimizes the time cost involved in launching new items into the market making the corporations grow in competitiveness. It facilitates such strategies which have many selling hand channels and help in the organic search of products from the internet. With PIM, a lot of the time spent on everyday operations is saved, therefore, money recovery is faster and inter-departmental collaboration is greater resulting in more satisfied customers and better sales.
How to Choose a Suitable PIM System
In order to choose the suitable PIM system, the first thing is to see how such PIM can adapt to the company’s growth. Always ensure that it integrates well with the current systems as ERP and eCommerce platforms. Select a system that is user friendly and provides a decent web design tool. Request from vendor reasonable support and maintenance, and guarantee of security and compliance of the system. Pay attention to internal and multi channel features and impose cost limitations. If you can test the system or ask for a demo to make sure it fits your needs.
Implementing a PIM System
A systematic approach goes a long way in establishing a PIM system. People are generally resistant to making changes in their normal routines; hence it is necessary to meet them at the beginning, illustrate the merits of the change, and offer education. Gaining the consent of the employees to carry out the new plans may also be an uphill task, and therefore, the new system should be user friendly and support provided continuously. No matter how well… rather how timely the migration is done, one can expect that data migration will remain one of the toughest stages because there are many issues to address – believe in good data! Organization inserting the PIM, its approved solutions, will have to solve the problem of integrating with the systemic ancillary tools such as ERP and CRM through the use of additional stuff like API integrations.
In addition, the software that will be used should be chosen such that provisions are made for further improvement and expansion of the database and product catalogs to accommodate more as would be needed including and mostly cloud-based systems.
Conclusion
Product Information Management is an indispensable aspect in the operations of an organization seeking to control its product data. With an efficient PIM system in place, the information about your products will always be correct, relevant and current as a result improving customer satisfaction and simplifying processes. In the present-day market, technology and future-oriented strategies like PIM are essential whether one is in a small company or a big company.
