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Catalog Management is increasingly
garnering industry interest as a strategic weapon to better
inform,
influence and convince buyers to purchase products. Catalogs
that are rich, accurate and up-to-date
provide a means for differentiation in highly competitive industries
where margins are reducing drastically.
But implementing a world-class catalog management system is
not easy. Product information has multiple
facets – content, images and documents – that are
worked upon and required by many departments
within the organization, often at the same time. In addition,
as companies progress into multi-channel
catalogs – primarily Print and Web – the task of managing
and ensuring consistent product information
across all customer touch-points becomes even more complex.
The creation of a catalog involves two distinct process groups
- product change management
(preparation of the product information) and catalog management
(creation and design of a specific
channel catalog). Maximum process efficiency is achieved by
clearly defining the skills and talents
required in each step of the process, and presenting those stakeholders
with the correct tools and
information.
The complexity of managing product information and creating
catalogs can be better tackled by analyzing
the various processes in an organization, and defining a set
of core best practices that efficiently
underpins these tasks.
This document is about a set of such practices. These best practices
are built around the basic building
blocks of catalog management – data, people, processes
and measurements – with further analysis of
best practices for each.
Ongoing evaluation of the best practices ensures that the catalog
management system is refined and
stays in line with the organization as it evolves.
Organizations that are using these best practices are able to
organize people and processes around
product information, and are producing rich, accurate and up-to-date
catalogs that can be presented
consistently to all customer touch-points.
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