Product Data Integration and Apps Integration: Make Data More Accessible & Functional for End-Users

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By: Sagar Sharma

Product Data Integration and Apps Integration: Make Data More Accessible & Functional for End-Users

For all modern businesses, data becomes the core and main weapon. Maintaining high-quality data is evitable for businesses to sustain in today’s heavy competitive market. If you are running a commerce business in a cloud-based environment, both application product data integration and apps integration are essential for gaining high data accessibility and scalability.

This article elaborates how product data integration and apps integration play a handy role in making data highly accessible and functional to end-users of modern businesses.

What is Product Data Integration?

Product Data Integration, or PDI, is the process of taking disparate metadata and integrating it into a variable, centralized store known as a Meta Data Management Platform. The goal of PDI is to make information more accessible by allowing all teams on the web project implementation to see one true version of the data.

Why Product Data Integration Is Important for Businesses?

With the advent of AI and IoT, the retail industry is transforming. To stand out and remain ahead of the competition, retailers need to embed product data at every level in all channels. There is a whole new breed of innovative technologies in the retail ecosystems for data practitioners to implement Product Data Integration as a practice to support their companies in the retail market.

The need to scale up is also why retailers are embracing Product Data Integration. As they experience growth and scale, their requirements change and new challenges arise that necessitate implementing a more robust and flexible solution.

Businesses achieve many through product data integration

  • The first thing is that traditional companies stand to benefit from it because part of product data integration just involves a database conversion, and managing databases can be outsourced or auctioned off relatively cheaply through outsourcing agencies.
  • PDI can make use of worldwide keyword coverage, enabling them to find relevant product information with minimal effort.
  • This tool integrates with a variety of formats or locations including CSV or XML files.
  • Data Integration is easy-to-use, yet powerful software that simplifies the data entry process for managing your products.
  • With minimal effort, users can find relevant product information with its help.

Product Data Integration – What Benefits It Offers?

Product Data Integration (PDI) is used for many purposes in online marketing. There are multiple benefits offered by PDI which will be discussed in this section.

Data Management Becomes Easier

The major benefit of data integration is that traditional companies stand to benefit from it because part of product data integration just involves a database conversion, and managing databases can be outsourced or auctioned off relatively cheaply through outsourcing agencies.

Improves Decision-Making Ability

Almost all top eCommerce businesses rely completely on their data. Managing accurate and unified data in a single location will help teams and business stakeholders work more efficiently. Also, it enables business leaders to take vital decisions quickly upon proper analysis of data.

Improves Customer Relationship

Data integration streamlines and simplifies the product data for intuitive understanding and usage; downstream customers gain business intelligence about the sales trends for products by receiving access to aggregated views – as a result, customer value goes up, and the return on investment goes up.

Increases System Adoption

Data integration outweighs data shortcomings where retailers enjoy a seamless process from online eCommerce transactions, brick-and-mortar store inventories, or production lines to distribution centers, warehouses, or transit stations.

It leads you to answer queries about product availability, quantity and price quickly for the needed channel and customer segments in no time.

Businesses amass enormous volumes of data. Consider client data, which itself is frequently housed in several locations within a business, ranging from customer engagement (CRM) systems to lead-generating tools to worksheets and financial apps.

However, the material may be somewhat altered or structured differently in each site. So, how can the business gain a complete image of its clients? Data integration is the solution.

Common Use Cases of Data Integrations

PDI simplifies the data entry process, meaning you don’t need to worry about searching through multiple websites or documents trying to find data pertinent to your product. In general, it is the process involved in transferring data from different sources and transforming them into similar formats before storing them in a unified location.

There are six process steps involved in the Product Data Integration solution which include Extracting Validated Items from backend systems/channels/output formats; and of course, merging all the data with references.

Data Integration helps to achieve high data accessibility and improve data integrity. It can be achieved in many ways; among them, Pimcore Data Integration is the most popular way which offers more benefits to businesses.

Here are the lists of common places where typical data integration takes place.

  • Migrating data to the data warehouse from various sources
  • Collecting and consolidating user data from multiple sources to a single & unified location
  • Providing data assistance for data transition between cloud environments

What Is Application Integration?

Application integration is a technique that brings the different applications together so that they can easily communicate with one another. As per the nature of each application, this may mean that an enterprise portal will communicate with an ERP or CRM with some other database and analytical system.

Why Application Integration Is Considered Important for Businesses?

“Application Integration” typically entails ensuring that data from one application can be read by another, to share information for use in generating reports for example. In a common scenario, data captured through a customer satisfaction survey drives the design of attitudinal questions for the next survey through Application Integration between the hardware-based system (survey software) and software-based system (customer database software).

The collaboration between apps, software, and devices can be achieved through application integration. This ensures fast and easy sharing with similar products. The integration gives the firms a competitive edge over their rivals in the market. Moreover, it leads to an increase in work productivity by providing seamless communication access and better security for data.

Here is why Application Integration is considered important for a business

  • It empowers businesses to be more responsive to the opportunities
  • It offers a more engaging user experience with the businesses
  • It enables businesses to transit with the new technologies
  • It boosts business productivity

Application Integration – What Benefits It Offers?

With application integration, companies can create a seamless experience for the customer. Features or products that were traditionally only available in two separate parts can now be bundled with each other and improved.

Application Integration is the process of establishing a connection between applications or systems. Application integration creates and optimizes an online environment that is customer-centric.

Application integration may be of different types – technical or business, depending on the level of their relationship. The average project life cycle for application integration spans from six months to three years. The crucial aspect of all of this is that an enterprise should strive for an agile and cloud-friendly approach to app development.

Here are the lists of a few benefits offered by Application Integration:

Provides More Control & Connection

The improvement in data management through application integration helps business leaders to gain more control and connect with the company.

Simplifies Business Processes

Apps integration streamlines and simplifies the company processes. It doesn’t matter whether the company has a complex or simple IT infrastructure; the integration process is carried out by long-term processes and relationships between applications and software.

Apart from those, several benefits vary depending on the type and size of the business in question. Regardless, putting this process into action has shown tremendous success rates over the past few decades.

Common Use Cases of Application Integrations

When compared to connecting program-to-program, Application Integration simplifies the integration and is a much faster process. Most companies integrate their software to capture data from insights derived from the past but also use it as a strategic prevention mechanism for handling future changes and unexpected interruptions such as changes in regulations or the loss of a major customer contract.

In general, application integrations are commonly referred to as the connectors between two well-known applications. The integration process ensures both applications operate together and produce high performance.

Application integration helps to achieve better functionality and saves a lot of time by speeding up data transportation.

Here are the lists of common places where typical application integration takes place.

  • For data collection through multiple Internet of Things (IoT) devices
  • Data collections from on-premises ERP systems to CRMs
  • Data collection for legal sync
  • Implementing automation between apps for better workflows

How Do Product Data Integration and Apps Integration Differ?

Both Product data integration & app integration offers significant benefits to the eCommerce store, especially in making the end-users more accessible and functional with the data. However, both integrations have their own set of pros and cons.

Here are the key differences you can find between product data integration & application integrations.

1. Data Transferring Speed

The first and foremost difference between these two integrations is data transformation speed. Application integration works in real-time and also with smaller data sets. Owing to that, the data transfer will be much faster.

Companies using application integration can act quickly to the new information or face issues with the performance. It doesn’t matter from which location data is updated; companies can able to access the updated information instantly.

On the other hand, product data integration and apps integration are carried out in batches. So, the data transferring will take time and is slower when compared with application integrations.

However, with data integrations, the data transfer will be initiated once all the processes are completed; this ensures the data quality is maintained at a high level. Unlike application integration, data integration deals with a large set of data.

2. Organizational Management

Application integration processes are currently managed by DevOps, just like the company’s software development processes. By doing so, the product data integration and apps integration process connects various applications and creates workflow efficiency.

On the other hand, the data integration processes are carried out by DataOps. The data integration processes are highly focused on data management and the automation of data. Data integration is highly useful for business leaders to make quick business decisions.

Product Data Integration and Apps Integration: How Can Be It Useful?

Data Integration is highly focused on product & business data. So, it will play a handy role when an organization depends on analyzing the static product data. Moreover, it will be helpful for business leaders to take vital business decisions.

On the other hand, the application integration suits businesses that require data interaction in real-time. By integrating all the product data through the application, the transmission of updated data will be high and it can be quickly viewed or accessed by users from any of the linked systems.

Data integration is for an organization that highly depends upon a large set of data. Also, it ensures data quality and is easily accessible by the tools. By using data integration, businesses can achieve new insights through data precision and by improved business operation because of consistent accurate data.

On the other hand, application integration is highly preferred by businesses that require high-speed data transactions. Through application integration, you can easily translate the collected data via various 3rd party tools or by other applications quickly. This ensures greater access to the updated & accurate data which are from disparate sources easily and quickly.

Bottom Line

As product data integration and apps integration becomes inevitable, business leaders should make sure they integrate all their data sources. The open-source platform Pimcore enables business leaders to take advantage of data & apps integration through easy import & export of data from external systems. Pimcore data integration offers seamless integration in existing IT landscapes through powerful APIs.

So, what you are waiting for is to implement Pimcore for your business and reap all the benefits it offers through apps & data integrations.

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