Maybe you have already gone through the process of starting a business, watching it grow – and watching the amount of product information grow simultaneously. No matter where you are in this process, you are aware that handling product data is an important factor in your sales success. If your product information is out of control, it will be extremely difficult to scale your business in the long run.
You have probably also heard about Product Information Management systems, or PIM systems as they are often referred to. A PIM system can help you structure your data, handle it all from one place and seamlessly push it to all your publications, apps, websites, online stores, portals, etc.
It goes without saying that this is a very efficient process, but does this mean that all companies are suited to PIM? The short answer is no.
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These companies are not suited to PIM
A PIM system is an investment and, even though there are many evident use cases for a PIM solution, not all businesses can achieve enough value from the PIM system to justify such an investment. For example, manufacturers that produce only a few, unique products on order – e.g., large manufacturing machines – will not derive enough benefit from a PIM solution.
The same applies to small businesses, where there are hardly any people involved in the product work. The value generated by a PIM system will often be in its process streamlining, so if there are only a few processes to optimize, the costs will most likely exceed the rewards.
These companies harvest all the benefits of PIM
If you can answer yes to one or more of the following statements, you will probably be in a situation where you can achieve great benefits and a positive ROI by implementing a Product Information Management system to handle your product information:
- Your products are complex with many variants
If your products come with many different features and/or have large data sets in different systems, you can profit significantly from a PIM System’s data inheritance functionality as only the specific data that differs for new product variants must be entered manually. You will also benefit from being able to model your data exactly as you please. - You have many different types of product information associated with the products
This may be due to, for example, a large amount of information and descriptions, use of metadata or complex relationships between data. - You sell your products in various markets, perhaps even in different 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 and must consequently increase your marketing activities to new markets, several websites, several catalogs and pricelists, etc.
High activity means that there are several actions to optimize and therefore, the PIM system will rapidly demonstrate a high ROI. - You publish your product information in various sales and marketing channels
If e-commerce is one of them, then you are just strengthening the business case. Large gains can also be expected if you are producing digital and printed catalogs, pricelists and data sheets. - You want to work with more product data from suppliers – or enrich the data that you receive
Without a PIM solution to support the process, handling the import of information from several suppliers is a resource-demanding piece of work, and the data is often supplied in different formats, with inconsistent quality. With the supplier module that comes with some PIM systems, e.g. the Perfion Supplier Portal, you can handle supplier data efficiently.
Another even more basic rule of thumb is that the more times you must 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.
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