Best Practices for Successful Product Information Management (PIM)

With the rise in ecommerce services, demand for product information management grows to deal with sales of goods. It aims to centralize product data, enhance product experience, restrict data control personnel, and increase overall productivity. This new record-keeping practice uses several methods to make sure that product information gets handled effectively.

While companies can use spreadsheets to store this information, it has become an obsolete and relevant option. Its whopping 25.1 percent growth rate till 2027 is a testament to its promising prospects. Using spreadsheets increases the error rate, and each invoice error costs $400. In this post, we discuss specific product information management (PIM) strategies that will help your business.

Strategies to Improve Product Information Management (PIM)

Collect All Product Information

You can establish sound infrastructure by collecting all product data across the entire organization in a single location. Since all data is available at a single source, team members can easily access, manage, and post this information to multiple locations. After gathering data, you also need to ensure that it is consistent and has a great format. Through PIM, Proctor and Gamble found that 3.6 percent of its orders had obsolete products. With PIM, you have fewer redundancies, fewer errors in product data, greater traceability, greater scalability, and improved control over the product management process.

Understand and Determine Scope

Once you collect all information, you need to define the scope of your product information management. You need to determine if you should model your entire catalog or manage your items from the beginning. You also need to decide if you'd start small and expand or transform your PIM completely.

Large enterprises benefit from the starting small approach because they can test the market response of a product before introducing the entire range. They can launch a single product line in a small region and understand how it performs. Based on the response, they can roll out new products or expand the reach to other areas. However, a full-blown approach helps enterprises realize all the benefits of PIM systems and establish centralized data management.

So, while choosing your method, answer the following questions:

1. Should we manage product subsets or handle the entire database?
2. Which market areas should you target?
3. How critical is time-to-market for PIM?

Choose Software that fits your PIM Definition

Now that you've defined your scope of work, you can turn to various product information management services. However, before buying software, understand your present condition in business and define specifically why you need it. After defining your needs, choose software that fulfills them and aligns with your objectives. This action is the best product information management strategy for all businesses to follow. Investing wisely in the right software sets the right expectations, measures PIM's effectiveness well, and builds your e-commerce capabilities.

Here are a few expectations you can have from your PIM software: -

• Improve the User Experience
• Enhance Marketing Strategies Productivity
• Expand into New Mediums
• Advance Team Collaboration
• Launch Product Faster
• Scales Businesses to New Regions Rapidly
• Deliver High-quality Product Data

Select your PIM Team

Before you begin your PIM processes, select you're A-team that'll take charge of it and implement it properly. While choosing your team, consider having individuals that have detailed information about your products, desirable catalog format, and your e-commerce channel requirements. PIM intends to help your teams. So, identify key members that manage product information and save time from the PIM solutions.

Create Processes and Roles

After choosing your team, figure out what processes can help you realize the most product information management benefits. You can begin by identifying the best IM enrichment practices and understanding how your team fits in the process. Keep in mind that your chosen team members are domain experts and know how the workflow should function. Additionally, they can give you many suggestions that enhance your processes even further. Recognize every contribution and list all the roles and permissions that'll help them accomplish the task.

For a successful PIM implementation, ensure your team focuses on high-value tasks and sidestep the repetitive ones. Encourage your teams to leave the repetitive tasks like arranging complex datasets to computers. Ask them to focus on creating an emotional connection with customers by writing captivating product descriptions.

Train your Team

You can ensure you achieve the most from your PIM projects by training your team effectively. Ensure that your team knows how it works and how it helps them improve daily operations. Your PIM's success depends on how your employees use the new system. When rapid changes take place, resistance from your employees is natural. Through technical and functional training, you can deal with these issues and prepare your team to function well with the new systems.

Through functional training, cover PIM operations such as catalog creation, product organization, and many others. Train your PIM technical team to handle implementation, performance tuning, and integration issues. Focus on the internal adoption of these systems by handholding your employees throughout the change management journey.

Avoid Using Too Many Tools

Ventana Research states that 56 percent of firms use more than 5 systems that contain product data. When you use too many tools, your product data gets scattered across different systems. Collating this data becomes difficult because it's incompatible. Without the centralization of information, managing product information becomes annoying and time-consuming. If you still combine data to form a database, you'll inevitably make mistakes.

Improve Customer Experience through PIM

A B2BMarketing survey states that 96 percent of participants believe customer experience influences their purchase. Furthermore, 83 percent will refer you to others if they have a positive experience with you. Through excellent PIM projects, ensure you keep the overall customer experience in mind while implementing product information management.

Conclusion

Don't get stuck with faulty and incomplete product information! Get a product information management system that aligns with your business objectives today. It'll help you organize data effectively and use it to enhance your customer experience.