8 Most Common Product Information Management Challenges

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By: Sagar Sharma

8 Most Common Product Information Management Challenges

No matter what industry you belong to, customers are looking for more personalized and highly relevant experiences.

Along with customized experiences, customers want to have access to a new range of products. Thus, to meet the ever-increasing demands of the products, businesses need to manage the product information efficiently.

As more and more customers prefer to shop online or at least they search for the product online before visiting the nearest store. Hence, it becomes essential for retailers to keep updated their website with the information customers look for.

Businesses have to make sure their multiple channels or customer touchpoints enable the buyers with up-to-date and furnished information in the most intuitive and convincing way. You need to manage a wide range of vendor multiplicity, product catalogs, as well as complex product details too.

Do you think you can achieve such a great level of agility and integrity in the distribution of product data through manual product information management?

In the process of addressing all the complex requirements of the different stakeholders through manual product information management methods, you encounter many challenges. It won’t make you capable to meet the changing market condition and ensure the success and growth of your organization.

Let’s learn about the most common challenges faced by the Product Information Management systems and how you can address them.

8 Most Common Challenges Faced by Product Information Management

1. Lack of transparency amongst internal teams and departments

In small organizations, communication is more open and transparent. But, in large scale organizations, effective business commutation is the biggest challenge. The employees cannot share information, priorities, goals, and tools due to the communication barrier. This ultimately ends up making your department least productive and inefficient.

You have to establish some effective strategies to remove the communication gap across your teams and departments. For the success of any organization, it is very necessary to have a cross-functional and collaborative team.

Product information software can help you establish a communication platform where different teams and departments interact with each other. The employees can easily update others about the tasks and deadlines and help in eliminating any confusion by bringing everyone on a single page. So, your team becomes more productive and generates better results.

2. Dealing with multiple sales channels becomes tough

To strengthen your brand presence, it is very essential for you to establish a uniform and strong presence on multiple customer touchpoints and sales channels. But it is challenging to meet the frequently changing demands of different market place websites.

Every channel has different requirements for information format and types. They have their own standards and product list approval policies. They might ask you to set different prices for different regions.

With the help of a PIM solution, you can achieve all these just with a few clicks. IT allows you to toll out up-to-date and accurate information. Moreover, you can launch the latest update in different languages, at different prices, for the different markets.

3. Managing a massive amount of product data

Businesses have to manage a massive amount of content for a wide range of products. Along with the product data, they have to manage information related to different sales channels, multiple services, distributed vendors and suppliers, and many other details that businesses have to deal with in order to deliver a better customer experience.

If you manage such enormous data manually, then searching for relevant and accurate information becomes a tedious job. You need to sort all the content to get the right one.

An advanced PIM solution can collect and organize the districted data as well as standardize product information. The software offers a centralized place to store and manage product data. Thus, the Product Information Management system allows to manipulate and handle any amount of product data effortlessly.

4. Disorganized product catalog

If your organization is selling a large number of products then it will be difficult to manage such a huge product catalog manually.

Being a business owner, you need to deal with different requirements of multiple sales, a huge range of products, and several vendors. It becomes challenging to maintain and update the uniformity of data in your product catalog. Eventually, you develop a complex catalog that is difficult to keep organized.

A flexible PIM software enables you with an automated process for consolidating the product information in a centralized location and collecting the data from different vendors. Product Information Management solution simplifies your product data management and makes the product marketing easier.

5. Manual tasks and spreadsheet will be error-prone

Companies, who manage the product information manually, highly rely on spreadsheets. Managing such a huge amount of data in spreadsheets is a cumbersome and time-consuming activity. You have to upload thousands of products in the spreadsheets manually that is quite error-prone.

If every individual across the organization managing the data in separate sheets, it creates a huge communication gap. In case data is missing from the spreadsheet, you will end up by presenting wrong and ambiguous information to the customers.

Using a feature-rich product information management system you can upload the data in bulk. Moreover, it improves the accuracy of spreadsheets and allows to create workflows too.

6. Handling cluttered digital assets

While managing a wide range of products you might need to create and manage varied product videos, marketing visuals, presentations, manuals, photos, and many other digital resources on a regular basis. Thus, you have to manage a huge pile of digital assets.

All these digital files and archives are very important to your business. If you fail in managing them in an organized way, then it will be difficult for you to sort and retrieve the relevant product information whenever required. It is better to manage all your digital assets in a library, in a consolidated way.

Using a robust PIM solution, you can easily manage and sort numerous data such as videos, marketing data, product attributes, etc. in a centralized platform. It becomes smoother to find and retrieve the exact information when you need it.

7. Lack of supplier communication

You need to set up a communication platform where you can update the suppliers about the launch of the new products, changes in your requirements and regulations, provide updates about the existing products, and more.

There are chances the data may be in the wrong format, incomplete, and misspelled. If you obtain such data, then you will have an inadequate and incorrect product listing. You need to correct the data before publishing it on your eCommerce website. Editing of such inappropriate data takes considerable effort and time.

Product Information Management system works as a portal that allows you to interact with your vendors seamlessly. It allows you to deal with an emergency situation and problems as well as streamlines your supply chain.

Smooth communication with the suppliers helps you improve the time to market your product by ensuring the authenticity of the product information at the same time.

8. Product launch cycle delays

The manual product information management ends up you with manual tasks, unorganized product catalog, cluttered information, and so on. It directly impacts on your product launch lifecycle. Your product launch could be delayed.

For the success of any business, timely product launch is very essential. The organizations should have better control over the product’s lifecycle and a perfect vision about the end product in order to gain higher productivity.

The next generation PIM solution provides you a dashboard that enables you with a consolidated view of your product data. You can track all the updates and have a holistic view of all your product information.

Moreover, a PIM solution helps your sales and marketing team know which are ready to market products and which sales channels are more suitable to display them. Thus, the platform offers enriched product information and timely product launch that eventually increases sales and delivers better customer experiences.

How Credencys Addresses Product Information Management Challenges using Pimcore?

Credencys has proven experience and expertise to build custom product information management solution as per your custom business needs. To deliver a robust solution, we utilized the advanced features and functionalities of Pimcore’s Product Information Management.

We have a team of Pimcore developers who help you to embrace digital transformation for your eCommerce store by harnessing end-to-end Pimcore development services. We can build a solution that collects the data from different channels, enables you with the consolidated view of product data, and allows you to deliver the contextual product information to your customers.

Are you ready to drive a paradigm shift in your business by replacing your manual product information management process with a PIM solution? Let’s Connect

Frequently Asked Questions on Product Information Management

What is Product Information Management?

Product Information Management is also known as PIM. The advanced PIM pal forms allow you to manage the massive product data that required to sell and promote products through multiple distribution channels. It allows you to manage all your product data and digital assets in a centralized location. It can also collect, manage, and refine the data efficiently to generate effective output.

What is a Product Information Management solution?

The PIM solution enables businesses with a single platform where you can collect, manage, and enrich your product information, distribute them on different customer touchpoints and sales channels, and create an engaging product catalog.

How does Product Information Management work?

Product Information management allows you to manage all your product data, content, and other resources in a centralized place that you can use to market and sell your products. The solution also provides high-quality data to ensure your staff can use it for multiple sales channels or internal use.

What are the best Product Information Management solutions?

There is a lot of Product Information Management software available in the market but most of them are expensive. Here are a few cost-effective PIM solutions that you can consider for your business. The best PIM solutions are Pimcore, Akeneo, EnterWorks, PIMworks, Stibo Systems, Agility Multichannel, Salsify, and more.

Say goodbye to data chaos and embrace the power of PIM/MDM to supercharge your business growth!