Congratulations! You have decided to invest in a product information management (PIM) solution. You, like so many other manufacturers and wholesale distributors, realize the benefits implementing a PIM solution provides:
- Enhances your online presence and that of your trading partners.
- Improves aftermarket sales support and reducing product returns.
- Broadens your sales reach via new distribution channels or marketplaces.
- Empowers your customer-facing teams with product knowledge and better cross-sell and up-sell sales support.
As you begin planning your next steps, there are some crucial questions you should consider before you deploy a PIM and go live. Surprisingly, most of these questions aren’t for your IT team; they are focused on process, scope, and business value and should be answered early by the business stakeholders sponsoring the initiative. We spend days with executives drilling into these considerations and serve up scores of these questions, but these are, in my mind, the big five:
Question 1 – Do we start with a clean slate or fix product data quality later?
It is natural to want to start with perfect product data when investing in a new PIM solution because you can immediately target the ROI deliverables you have set, such as revenue growth, increased AOV, spin-up of additional revenue channels, etc. It also immediately creates trust within the organization, thus improving internal team adoption.
By “perfect data,” we generally mean accurate, complete, and up-to-date information for the entire product catalog you wish to carry. Unfortunately, that tends to be a tall order in many B2B organizations. Manufacturers must reach out to product management and engineering teams to gather, check, and update product information. Distributors need to contact manufacturers to request their latest product data or ask them to review the data they have. In either case, the counterparties are often unreliable or slow to respond, and, to make matters worse, some of the data you want may not exist.
Does that mean you should plow ahead and start with product content that is less than ideal? No, and here’s why.
There are additional options you should consider to improve your data quality quickly and easily:
- Outsource your data cleanup and enrichment to an external party that specializes in your industry and understands your customers and your products.
- Subscribe to existing product data libraries that furnish ready-to-use product SKUs for your organization’s use. These subscription programs constantly maintain and enrich the data, ensuring the latest product information is displayed at every customer touchpoint.
Question 2 – How do we structure our data for optimal efficiency?
Before you ask for product information, you need to know what to ask for. To do that, you must be clear about the structure you use to manage your data. If you want the ability to categorize products based on your purpose, your PIM solution must allow for multiple folder structures or taxonomies.
Customer-facing, eCommerce-focused web display categorizations group products based on a customer’s needs. Barbecues may be found in the same category as charcoal briquettes. However, when you collect product information, those two SKUs should be built in different categories so that the attributes you collect for each are appropriate. It’s important to know if a barbecue has wheels, but buyers aren’t looking for briquettes with wheels. In addition to web display-based categorizations, other organizing principles can include merchandising ownership, financial reporting, warehouse location, item data onboarding, and more.
Is it prudent to move ahead when you do not have your data structure figured out completely? No, and here’s why.
There are additional options you should consider to assist with taxonomy and categorization:
- Request outside assistance from data experts regarding taxonomy creation. They can help you define and structure your product categories, as well as provide guidance regarding category levels, attribute profiles, left navigation considerations, site search and SEO considerations, and much more. By tackling this early on, you can avoid confusion and SKU reassignment down the road.
- Purchase product category profiles. Knowing how to describe a product is not always easy. Buyers are often looking to compare similar products on specific data points and will ignore a product if it is not appropriately or exhaustively described. Getting it right requires experience and know-how from industry experts. Your categories may already have been investigated and described, so by purchasing this knowledge, you canbe on your way even faster.
Question 3 – What do we consider to be a complete product record?
Obviously, the more product information you can provide about a product, the easier it will be for a buyer to make a purchasing decision. At the onset, we tell organizations they should strive to provide the following content for their SKUs:
- Product IDs
- Multiple product descriptions
- Product images
- Benefit bullets
- Product videos
- MSRP, MAP, and other price points
All these pieces of information are undoubtedly crucial for the online selling effort, and the PIM is the engine that houses this content and drives your eCommerce.
However, it is worth widening the net and creating a complete and comprehensive product data record that includes additional details for the buyer, not to mention important information used internally in your organization:
- Packaging dimensions
- Manufacturer source
- Discontinued Items
- Parts and accessories
- SEO descriptions
- Supporting documents like instruction
manuals, MSDS, and spec sheets - Alternate channels
- Marketing channels
- Cross-sells/up-sells
- Kits and bundles
- Product families
By having all this data in one central location in the PIM, data updates can be made quickly and easily and then sent automatically to all your sales channels.
Is it possible to move forward without having the product record fully defined? Yes, but not without challenges.
Additional touchpoints with internal product management and engineering teams or with external suppliers could become more complicated. To mitigate potential challenges, make sure your PIM has workflow tools that will allow you to segment products that require “work in progress” versus SKUs that are now “ready to use.” You may also want to consider enrichment efforts by a third party to quickly “level up” your entire product catalog.
Question 4 – Who will be involved, now and later?
PIM deployment involves three phases: selecting a PIM solution, configuring and testing it, and using it. In all three stages it is vital to not only have data management SMEs involved but also insist that relevant critical business leads participate. Don’t take no for an answer; if your organization is truly product-centric, then everyone should be willing and ready to see your PIM through all three phases. As sales channels increase in volume and complexity, the PIM will become even more critical to growing your revenue. Add to that the importance a PIM plays as a clean, trustworthy, repeatable data source to train and deploy your Gen AI models and it is an executive mistake to stay away.
Is it possible to continue on without deep executive involvement? Yes. However, the chance of success will be significantly diminished if you don’t have buy-in and commitment across the organization – from the executive level to daily PIM users.
Question 5 – How do we prove the PIM’s value, especially when the going gets tough?
After you have made all the hard decisions and worked to develop a great product portfolio, it is essential to show your PIM’s value. Most organizations are skeptical about new processes and technologies unless they can be linked directly to revenue gain and cost/risk avoidance. The only way to quantify that is to compare your pre-PIM business with your post-PIM business.
Many times, teams forget to quantify their baseline in their eagerness to go live and get to a new and better state, but it is essential to gather the current state data points (pre-PIM) where you believe you will see the most significant benefits. Whether it is reduced returns, increased AOV, faster item setup times, or an uplift in spare parts revenue, track the baseline data now before your PIM rollout while you still can. As you do that work, share the data with the responsible business leads and have them see and approve the data points you will later compare against. This will help you show value when you ask for changes in work processes and “extra” effort from traditionally reluctant teams and trading partners.
As we’ve seen with many of our customers, these five questions will prove valuable in your journey to better product data management. I welcome your feedback and would happily discuss your unique scenarios with you. Feel free to email me at willem.van@unilogcorp.com.
Willem Van Dijk is Vice President of Sales – Manufacturing at Unilog. With 20+ years of experience in the data management and integration space, he has held multiple strategy, sales, and management positions in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific.