PIM is the abbreviation for Product Information Management. A PIM system’s most important task is to help a company manage large amounts of complex product information and distribute all of this information efficiently on the relevant channels.

A good PIM system provides a company with a “single source of truth”. In other words, a central system where you have easy access to all of the company’s product information, secure in the knowledge the data is valid.

A PIM system creates a great deal of value in two ways:

1. It prepares the company’s marketing and sales efforts, thus helping to increase revenue.
2. It streamlines the company’s internal processes.

In essence, a PIM system is a central database of product data. For example, Perfion PIM has a Windows client and a user specific browser client, which is based on data from an SQL server. The users link to the database, where they can create new products and fields and add or edit information, which can be distributed from the database to a number of different channels.

The PIM system can deal with all types of product data – text, images, video, sound and all document types.

If you can identify with one or more of the following descriptions, it is very likely that your company will quickly achieve a positive ROI on an investment in a PIM system.

– You promote your products on several different channels. If e-commerce is one of them, then you are just strengthening the business case.

– You operate in several markets and communicate in several languages. Every new language layer adds complexity, which makes it difficult to manage the marketing manually in a cost-effective way.

– You pursue growth targets, which make it necessary to increase the marketing activities to new markets, several websites, several catalogs and similar. High activity means in all simplicity that there are several activities to optimize and therefore, the PIM system will quickly demonstrate a high ROI.

– Your product information is complex. This may be due to, for example, a large amount of information and descriptions, use metadata or complex relationships between data. An example of a simple product with a high level of complexity is wine, because in addition to the information on the specific wine, it is connected with a lot of interesting metadata for the product – this can be information about the type of grape, the wine region, the winery, etc. 

– You want to have more product data from suppliers – or enrich the data that you receive. Without a PIM system to support the process, handling the importation of information from several suppliers is a resource-demanding task, and the data is often supplied in different formats, with inconsistent quality.

Another even more basic rule of thumb is that the more times you have to copy and paste information and send it from one system to another, the greater the need for a PIM system to automate some of the manual processes.

If you are considering investing in a PIM system, there are a number of questions that you need to answer before you can choose the correct system that meets your needs. That is why we have written a guide that you can download here.

It will help you determine which requirements you should specify for your future PIM supplier.

Based on our experience with hundreds of customers, we have selected five key themes aligned with a series of questions, which you should consider and find answers to.

For example, you will gain:

• An overview of all of the channels you need to make decisions about.
• Insight into how your processes can be supported by PIM.
• Clarity about how your ERP shall work with PIM
• An overview of all of the questions you should ask yourself in order to identify the right solution for you.