How to Select An Effective PIM Solution for Business?
As the business world keeps evolving continuously, time and data have become the most precious commodities. Effective management of those two vital business commodities becomes inevitable for modern businesses. Having an effective PIM solution for business will help perform well in the competitive marketplace. Without proper data management, your business goes nowhere in today’s market condition.
Data regulates everything in today’s modern businesses right from creating effective marketing strategies to making important business decisions. Moreover, data becomes the key to achieving better customer experience and overall brand experience.
This article briefs about Product Information Management solutions and provides you with valuable points to consider for picking the right PIM solution for your business.
What is the PIM Solution?
Product Information Management solution is one of the typical business software that allows businesses to collect, manage and optimize product data in a single place. The PIM solution helps you to manage the data and enhance the quality of the data shared across the selling platforms.
The ultimate goal of the PIM solution is to increase the product selling performance across the multichannel touchpoints and omnichannel. With the presence of the right PIM solution, businesses can deliver a whistling and compelling product experience to their target audience and increase product sales.
If you are interested in exploring more about Product Information Management and its capabilities, don’t miss visiting What is PIM. Don’t miss reading Product Information Management – An Exclusive Guide to get exclusive insights into all the aspects of PIM.
Why You Should Have a PIM Solution for Business?
The demand for PIM solutions is rising steeply after knowing the benefits it offers. With the presence of the PIM system, small businesses can able to manage their product content much easier. Also, the PIM system enables businesses to deliver accurate product content to consumers, collaborators, and other entity stakeholders.
Moreover, the product information management system streamlines the entire product data lifecycle and keeps them stored in a single location. Even digital assets like product images, videos, descriptions, specifications, SKUs, and so on are stored and shared for the benefit of online sales.
In addition to that, here are the lists of a few fascinating things your business can get through PIM solution.
- Provides a centralized data storage repository for storing all product digital assets
- Introduce automation to perform all manual tasks without errors
- Enables businesses to create content according to marketplace standards
- Easier to do product data syndication across all the available channels instantly
- Make things easier for data managers to update product information
- Data management becomes much easier along with the data change tracking features
- Helps businesses to avoid data breaches and prevent data loss
Most eCommerce businesses are using a robust Product Information Management platform to manage product data centrally and deliver excellent product experiences to the target audience. To explore the essence of PIM for eCommerce business, don’t miss visiting Why You Should Consider Implementing PIM For eCommerce Business?
Benefits of Having PIM Solution for Business
1. Complete management of product data
If you are thinking that the PIM system is pure data management software then you are wrong. PIM system does more than just data management. Apart from managing data, the PIM system ensures that product data is accurate and consistent.
PIM system ensures the product data can be easily edited, managed upon user rights, validating data, customized data view, and publishing & versioning of data in a controlled way.
In addition to that, the PIM solution empowers enterprises to construct flexible and highly-scalable data models. Along with offering the capability of conducting data audits, the PIM system quite literally accounts for data quality completely and enriches them according to the requirements/market condition.
Having the right PIM system helps an organization to carry out efficient management of product data lifecycle by tracking the data modification carried on data at any time.
2. Seamless Integration
The integration capability of the PIM system is considered one of the primary benefits of PIM to enterprises. A collaborative workforce is key to running a successful business. To have a collaborative workforce, existing enterprise systems need to be integrated.
PIM system helps enterprises to create a collaborative workforce by integrating all the existing enterprise software. With such seamless integration features, enterprises can easily mingle their various business software like ERPs, CRMs, CMS, logistical systems, business intelligence (BI) software, and so on a single platform.
Modern PIM solution comes with 100% API-driven capability allowing businesses to integrate existing or new technology and enabling real-time interaction between the systems at any moment. This creates an efficient way of data import or export operation between systems.
3. Efficient management of the digital asset
Modern PIM solution comes with a digital asset management (DAM) platform that enables enterprises to manage all their digital assets efficiently. PIM system with robust DAM functionality allows businesses to manage a vast assortment of digital product assets like videos, audio, animation, graphics, product catalogs, and so.
The presence of DAM in the PIM system helps businesses to perform effortless data onboarding, data enrichment, and data syndication operation. Therefore, enterprises do not need to invest in DAM separating instead simply choose the right PIM solution and leverage the DAM capabilities.
Apart from that, the DAM functionalities of the PIM system help businesses to gain better customer experience by delighting the target audience with the eye-catching digital assets of the products. This strengthens the brand experience among the target audiences and fuels a better sales ratio.
4. Supporting vendors and suppliers
Another key benefit of having a PIM solution is, it not only supports enterprises instead it creates a suitable ecosystem where enterprises or businesses can leverage it. The ecosystem created by PIM solution includes vendors and suppliers allowing them to ingest accurate product information.
Both suppliers and vendors will get an accurate and efficient data management process that streamlines the product data. This will be built a mutual relationship and smoother relationship between the enterprises, suppliers, and vendors.
With the help of PIM solutions, suppliers and vendors can realize the strategic objectives of an enterprise and can accomplish their common goals. The PIM system contributes a lot to the supplier and vendors through its consolidated supply chain process, enhanced forecasting of market demands, improved operational efficiency, and minimized overheads.
5. Builds customer experience and boosts ROI
Consolidation of the product data in a single data repository is the primary job of a PIM system. Once the consolidation process is complete, the system carries out the data management and data enrichment and streamlines the data.
All those set of actions performed by the PIM system lays a strong foundation for achieving an excellent experience that can yield higher ROI for enterprises. Optimizing and streamlining the messy and unstructured data in any format through the PIM system will be helpful for marketing and sales departments to improve their operational efficiency.
Making amendments to the existing promotions through the streamlined product data from the PIM system will fulfill customer experience. Moreover, it will improve the ROI of an enterprise dramatically.
6. Quick and easy to launch new products
The data delivery operation performed by the PIM solution is not only accurate, but it is also pretty quick. Because of that, operations like data hierarchy creation, structuring data, and validating data can be done in a remarkably shorter time.
Also, the PIM system creates quicker collaboration of various enterprise functions which will speed up the workflow and provide better operational efficiency. This will make things much easier for the sales and marketing team to do their job.
The multi-channel product delivery along with seamless data distribution allows businesses to reach the product to the target audience quickly through the preferred channels. This enables enterprises to launch their new products to the market much quicker than before.
Once the product reaches the market quicker, it will increase the chance of improving user engagement and increasing product sales.
To explore more benefits of the Product Information Management platform, don’t miss visiting What Are the Benefits of PIM (Product Information Management) Systems?
What to Look for in PIM Solution for Business?
In today’s market, there are a lot of PIM options available among those picking the right one is a bit daunting task. However, if you are familiar with the PIM features and functions along with your business needs then it will be much easier.
Here are the lists of a few characteristics you need to look out for while picking the right PIM solution for your business.
1. Easiness to handle
The PIM tool has become one of the essential business tools and it will be used by almost everybody in an organization. So, while picking a PIM solution make sure it is simple and easy to handle.
Moreover, the learning curve of the PIM system should be easy allowing anyone to learn quickly. So that, your team members or third-party vendors’ can learn how to operate the PIM system and make use of it.
Having a simple PIM system for your business will ease many employees’ workloads and improve productivity a lot. Moreover, easy operation on the PIM system will help businesses to manage their data easily in a single place and make things easier for workers to search and navigate data like never before.
2. Highly flexible and easy to customize
Considering the flexibility of the PIM solution is one of the valiant things for you when picking the right one for your business. The flexibility of the PIM system determines how easily you can make changes and additions to the PIM operations.
Every business has its unique requirements, so picking the PIM solution will the capability of custom-tailored features will be highly beneficial. Picking the PIM system based on the essential features and functional requirements of your business will fit well and save a lot of cost & time.
Moreover, having a tailored PIM solution for your business will be a big plus in achieving operational excellence without spending a lot.
3. In-built workflow
To run a successful business, stakeholders must manage more than a single team at a time. But managing multiple teams would be a hectic task in case if you are running a small business.
To avoid this, you would need an effective workflow management module. The module will ease the process of coordinating teams through enhanced communication and accountability.
The built-in workflow module of the PIM system helps business leaders to automate all those tedious tasks and allows them to focus on other vital aspects by saving a lot of time. The PIM workflow allows you to communicate with the team members, assign tasks instantly, and track the ongoing work.
This set of procedures will enable team members to complete tasks without delays and not waste resources.
4. Marketplace integrations
Marketplace integration is vital for any business to succeed in today’s competitive world. Integrating your business with popular marketplaces will allow you to reach your business among the target audience.
With enhanced exposure, you can easily improve your product sales and grab more loyal customers around the world.
Choosing the right PIM solution will enable you to integrate all popular marketplaces instantly. In addition, the system also provides you the option to add the marketplaces where you like to sell your products.
Also, the product syndication features and bulk data upload allows you to share product content to multiple channels at a time as per individual market standards. This ensures your product reaches the marketplace in time.
5. Budget-friendly PIM solution
It doesn’t matter whether you are running a small, medium, or large-scale business every penny you invest in your business counts. In today’s market, you can find numerous PIM solutions available at different prices. Among those choosing the right and affordable PIM solution that provides you more value to your business is more important.
Opting for a budget-friendly PIM solution with all the essential features will make things easy for you. Also, it will meet your business needs. Modern businesses can go for custom-tailored PIM solutions that would give much-needed affordability and help you to focus on your business goals.
To explore the cost of a Product Information Management platform, you must go through PIM Solution- How Much Does it Cost? It helps you get a clear idea about the e approx. costing of a PIM solution. The cost of the PIM solution varies from project to project. So, to get the exact amount of development, you need to share the exact project requirements.
In order to get clarity on the required features and capabilities of a robust Product Information Management solution, don’t miss visiting Must Have Features of Product Information Management System.
How To Choose the Right PIM Solution for Business?
1. What do you want to achieve with the PIM system?
When you are about to pick the PIM solution for your business then you should be straightforward with all your needs and requirements. Do should have your homework done properly before stepping into the product demo.
You can find a wide range of PIM solutions with a variety of features and functionalities available in the market. Among those picking the right one that suits your business is essential, for that you need to list all those needs of your business and search for the PIM solution.
2. Whether the PIM system has the capability of handling complex product information?
Almost every product information management (PIM) system can handle tons of product information. However, the real issue would be around whether the PIM solution can handle complex data.
Here is the set of questionnaires you need to get clarified for selecting a PIM solution.
- Whether your product has a high amount of information?
- Whether product information structure is important to be maintained?
- Whether those products are highly configurable?
The complexity of your product information determines how careful you should be in picking the right PIM solution.
3. Whether the PIM system supports cloud technology?
As the number of online shoppers keeps on increasing, your eCommerce business should have enough scalability to handle such increased traffic during peak sales hours. Your chosen PIM system of yours must have the ability to tackle the growing number of SKUs and high amount of traffic.
When it comes to scalability in the virtual world, you can’t ignore the power of cloud computing. Cloud computing helps your eCommerce business in many ways.
So, preferring the PIM solution that supports cloud premises would be the right choice. PIM solution with cloud-native allows businesses to perform automated updates and leverage the power of unlimited scalability.
4. Check whether the PIM system comes with seamless integration capability?
Integration features have become the most essential for all modern-day business software. As the business world was taken by the digital economy, every business model should be carried out based on the API economy.
APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) are the perfect solution for businesses that experience slow syncing of their product data.
A product information management (PIM) system comes with integration ability by default. The system offers a seamless integration platform where you can easily connect your PIM system with any other useful business software like ERP, CRM and so.
However, before making the purchase decision, make sure the PIM solution supports open APIs which deliver lightning-fast APIs for delivering product content in real-time.
5. Whether the PIM system comes with standard or customizable data export options?
In earlier days, businesses followed standard data exports among the interconnected systems. The standard data export module helps businesses to share data with the distribution channels according to the required specifications.
This restricts companies and businesses to share data in specific formats. If your company uses unique conventional fields for data, then you need to pick the PIM solution supporting the custom data export option.
Modern PIM solution comes with a customizable exporting option. This offers more flexibility and control on data exporting, allowing businesses to adapt to the desired format and export product information accordingly.
Bottom Line
There are so many options to consider when it comes to picking a PIM solution from the market. However, you need to understand the uniqueness of your business along with its need for picking the right PIM solution.
So that it will ease the life of business leaders. Always prefer a PIM system that can deliver a support custom-tailored solution for your business.
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