MDM vs. PIM: How to Select the Right One for Your Business?

Are you confused between MDM and PIM? Are you not able to judge which will be the right choice for your business?

Master Data Management (MDM) and Product Information Management (PIM) are not an option of each other. Actually, they complement each other. You need to choose one of them based on your requirements. To make the right choice, you need to get a profound understanding of both the platforms.

I would like to help you in getting better clarity about the differences between both of these platforms. So you can pick the best fit your business either choosing any of the one of selecting both of them.

Let’s get started with each platform.

Master Data Management

What is Master Data Management?

MDM is a set of tools or processes that provides the harmonized data to streamline the business operations across the various applications and systems. Using the advanced MDM solution, companies can collect, manage, match, clean, aggregate, and distribute accurate and consistent master data to the different analytical and operational systems.

When we say master data, MDM allows businesses to manage:

• Customer information
• Product information
• Employee information
• Cross-departmental information

Purpose of Master Data Management

Master Data Management is a crucial platform as it provides information in a uniform and consistent way. It typically handles the data from multiple domains. It manages information about product pricing and categorization, customer segmentation, staff strength, growth trends, customer details, employee payroll, and more.

MDM projects come with broad scopes and require considerable resources to maintain and implement. The use cases of MDM system are created around different functional departments across the organization and multiple business objectives.

Core Capabilities of Master Data Management

• Data modeling
• Master data matching and linking
• Data localization
• Data enrichment
• Data governance
• Data security
• Workflow management
• Hierarchy management
• Multiple implementation style
• Multiple domains and multidomain
• Data stewardship, and more…

Benefits of Master Data Management

MDM helps businesses to streamline their business operations by eliminating the data inconsistencies that enable companies with reliable data and make the right business decisions.

To achieve the best results, organizations have to invest considerable efforts with impacts and inputs throughout the company. The major benefits of MDM are:

• Providing a unified master view
• Offering cleaner data for analysis
• Making sure to meet compliance regulations
• Reducing data inconsistency that creates major impacts on your business operations
• Providing consistent data across multiple tools and platforms
• Increasing trust and accountability of your business data
• Allowing complain to edit the data in one place and ensure that the edits get reflected in all the relevant areas
• Connecting anything and everything

Are you still confused about making a decision what is better for your business from MDM or PIM or Both?

Talk to An Expert

Product Information Management

What is Product Information Management?

Product Information Management is part of Master Data Management.

Being a product-specific software, PIM allows companies to manage all their products and in a centralized location and enrich it to deliver accurate product images and descriptions across the different marketing and sales channels.

With Product Information Management, it becomes easy to manage images, enrich products and make sure they look compelling on different distribution channels such as website, print catalogs, marketplaces, retail point of sale, and mobile.

Purpose of Product Information Management

PIM simplifies the product data and description enrichment. When you use spreadsheets for product information management, you need to perform many repetitive and tedious tasks. Instead, you can use PIM to reduce the burden of performing repetitive tasks.

It specifically focuses on managing the different data related to your products. The PIM solution allows to add, update, save, manage, and monitor the information related to your offerings.

Apart from that, it manages data about different packages, product sizes, varieties of goods, and services. It also helps in analyzing and controlling the product information. It also helps you in managing data of merchandising and marketing.

It will be easy for you to connect the PIM to your eCommerce platform. PIM is useful to eCommerce and catalog managers, marketers, and data governance drivers and buyers. Compared to MMD, PIM is a small software so it allows for faster deployment with fewer resources to deliver better values in the context of product information management.

Core Capabilities of Product Information Management

Data Collection

Product Information Management solution manages the product data in a centralized location by collecting it from different sources such as ERP, CRM, flat files, databases, supplier portals, and media systems. It allows to prioritize the data source and apply data cleansing so that you can receive clean data that is easy to integrate into your catalogs.

Data Enrichment

Once you are done with collecting the data, eCommerce and marketing teams bring data to the next level by creating customized product descriptions, classifications, specifications, translations, media files, and data usage.

Product Information Management improves the data quality and enables organizations with a clear picture of which products having the data are complete. It provides all the necessary information about the products that are required for publication. Also, PIM helps you to identify which data need to be enriched.

Data Distribution

Using the PIM, you can distribute the enriched product data across all the sales channels such as mobile apps, marketplaces, eCommerce platforms, social networks, and AI-enabled tools like chatbot.

A robust PIM solution allows eCommerce companies to create awesome print catalogs rapidly with just a few clicks.

Benefits of Product Information Management

With the help of a Product Information Management solution, companies can unlock new sales channels, penetrate new markets, deliver a better customer experience, improve customer conversion, and more.

Explore the advanced benefits of PIM that help you in streamlining your operations and getting better business opportunities.
Boost collaboration and eliminate mundane work

• Decrease time-to-market
• Improve product catalog and information management processes
• Increase sales conversions
• Improve product data quality and accuracy
• Increase operational efficiency
• Manage the brand identity across multiple touchpoints
• Enhanced business efficiency and productivity
• Cost-saving
• Easy integration of 3rd party software
• Superior data management

Closing Lines

I hope the post will help you in making the right choice whether you should go for PIM or MDM or both. If you are still not able to judge, then don’t feel hesitant to consult our experts.

To enable business with all in one solution, Credencys use the Pimcore platform that consists of the capabilities of PIM, MDM, DAM, CMS, and eCommerce. All these components of Pimcore are available at zero licensing cost. So, definitely it is a highly cost-effective platform too.

Leverage our exclusive range of Pimcore development services to build an MDM or PIM or both the solutions that address your specific business goals and bespoke requirements. Let’s boost your presence across multiple customer touchpoints by harnessing the potential of Pimcore.