Are your enterprise systems not delivering on their promise? Is your Supply Chain Management system failing to return your investment? Too many orders with errors? Returns surpassing the industry average? Whatever the reason, you owe it to yourself to take a fresh look at your Product Information Management strategy. A PIM system is built with a single focus of structuring and delivering accurate product information for use across business systems.

Here are some synergies where your business systems can benefit:

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
Most organizations implement expensive enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems going through the rigors of long implementation cycles without having control over their product information. However, if product information was accurate and descriptive, an ERP system can deliver more. ERP systems manage product data and this data is often referred to as Item Master, Material Master or Product Master. Here are some synergies across business processes that occur in an ERP system:

Order Processing: On several occasions new customers and existing customers alike do not have the complete product information to place an order. In such a situation, the responsibility of searching and adding the right items to the order lies with the sales or the customer service representative. ERP systems are bad at helping sales and customer service personnel in finding the right products to create the order. Sometimes potential sales and up-sell/cross-sell opportunities are lost due to inadequate search mechanisms. Hence, having a searchable catalog with multi-dimensional search capabilities with rich and actionable product information is paramount.

Order Errors: Studies have shown that as many as 1 out of every 3 orders have an error. This is usually caused due to lack of accurate and descriptive product content in the ERP system where the order is placed. An ERP system, places sever restrictions on the size of a product description, which makes it hard to capture the details of a product vis-à-vis a similar product with slightly different characteristics. This leaves important information out of the description and opens the product for multiple interpretations, which in turn leads to incorrect orders. Incorrect orders result in expensive returns and a compromise in customer service.

Parked Invoices: Reconciliation is another area where an ERP system with better product information can make a difference. When invoices are sent to customers, they are often keyed in to their system, and matched with a purchase order. Invoices that match the purchase order are cleared, and when they don't match, the invoice gets parked for manual verification. This match often fails due to inaccurate product information at the line item level. Hence better product information can help in reducing the processing time of invoices.

Content Limitations: ERP systems have limitations on the number of fields a product can have. Even the most advanced ERP systems used by the fortune 500 companies can only handle a maximum of 250 odd attributes at the product, item or material level. In many cases this is not adequate since organizations need twice as many fields to operate efficiently. A PIM system gives organizations the ability to manage unlimited number of product attributes by providing a secondary extended product information management capabilities. This ensures that data that is secondary to the operational aspect can be delegated to the PIM system.

Structured Content: There are significant differences between an item, a product, a product line, and a classification (also referred to as a category). And there is text and information that needs to be managed at various levels for customer service, sales, and marketing purposes. ERP systems are not built to offer that kind of structure to product data. ERP systems are built for handling transactions between suppliers and customers. Hence, they often limit the structure to an Item. However, there are other parts of the organization like the web site, buying guides, and customer service that needs content. A PIM system can handle significantly complex structures for product information and deliver it to other business systems.
Unstructured Content: ERP systems aren't exactly built for handling product images, product related artwork, or marketing copy. However, having this non-transactional content (content that is not necessary to process an order, but is desirable for other processes such as sales, marketing, print catalogs, and customer service) in a system that integrates with ERP as and when necessary can make the system even more capable. How? A customer service rep can look up the order, and pull up the related image, product benefits or an installation guide. PIM systems are adept at handling unstructured data such as images, art work, marketing copy, bullets, product documentation, repair manuals and other associated literature. With a PIM system in place, you can link an Item from your Item Master in ERP to point directly to this content. This offers a two-fold benefit. You can manage content that cannot be managed in ERP. And, you can manage this content centrally, while making it available not only from ERP but from other business systems as well.

Supply Chain Management (SCM)
Supply chain management systems mostly rely on improving efficiencies on the supply side using sophisticated algorithms to make a variety of predictions. Organizations that invest in these systems have realized that the effectiveness of such a system directly correlates to the correctness of the data that is fed. If the input data is inaccurate, the outcome can be very different.

SCM systems rely on vendor and item related information to run these algorithms. Information such as sales data, vendor data, product dimensions, product weights, quantities, packaging data, product packaging options, product handling information, regulatory information and warehousing information to effectively run the algorithms to optimize the supply chain. In many cases, the shipment dimensions described by the vendor needs to be matched up with the shelf spacing. Hence, having the right actionable product information is paramount for an effective Supply Chain strategy. All product information that is necessary for an SCM system can be captured, validated and managed in the PIM system. One key feature of a PIM system is its robustness to validate content at the field level and ensure that all data complies to a set of standards. Or, the a maintained product value has consistency of interpretation. This capability of validating content is unique to a PIM system. Hence, valid, accurate and actionable product information that is necessary for an SCM system can be better provided by a PIM system.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
CRM systems employ catalogs to give sales associates the necessary insight into product data to persuade and convince customers. Having the right product options, product specifications, and having the products correctly categorized is necessary to find the right products. This is also necessary for the CRM system to suggest the right up-sell and cross-sell product choices. Though product data is necessary for CRM systems to function effectively, these systems seldom have the depth in functionality to manage product information in sufficient amount of detail.

In most organizations product information is authored without the involvement of sales. It is authored by product managers, business analysts and product specialists. Once authored this information is used by several other business systems, departments and business processes. A CRM system is more of an output channel for content rather than an authoring platform. Hence CRM vendors built little capability to manage this content. A CRM system is not suited to act as a product content management platform for the entire organization. It is built to better leverage content that is in a good state to better serve customers.

Businesses that have invested in a PIM system have empowered their product managers to manage product information once and used it across the entire organization including the CRM system. With better-managed content, a CRM system can be much more effective.

Procurement Systems / Buying Guides
To ensure consistent supply of products, and to better manage price fluctuations, some organizations procure similar products and parts from multiple vendors. Some other industries go a step further and create a workflow process to buy products and parts from vendors. In many cases a product or a part can be bought from many vendors. In such a scenario, a procurement system relies on finding all the possible vendors that can supply a part. This can be accomplished if all product information is accurately structured and the relationships that exist at the vendor-part level are maintained. So not is the accuracy of product data is important, but the also the relationships that exist between products.

A business using a PIM system has improved efficiencies with their buying guide to procure products more effectively. The buying guide, was built using product information that was managed and powered by a PIM system. The buying guide had all products and parts structured by categories, by vendor, and products cross-referenced across vendors. This gave the buyers multi-dimensional searching abilities, so they could go across vendors to procure a part. This opened up many options for the branches this business operated, so they could procure the parts from a geographically closer vendor and had better pricing flexibility. This also greatly streamlined the procurement process, resulting in reduction of cycle times.

Many businesses have invested in business systems that rely on product information. These systems have a lot of inaccurate, incomplete and cryptic product data. This data has to be fixed for the business systems to deliver better ROI and to live up to their promise. A PIM systems acts like a filter and keeps all content accurate, timely, and rich and acts like a buffer and an extension. Here lies the key synergy between a PIM system and other business systems. Your true asset is not the system, it's the data. Data is your strategic asset. And its power can be leveraged only if the proper steps are taken to keep it fresh and accurate. And it takes time to improve its quality.

Progressive organizations have realized this and many have taken steps to invest in a PIM system. And so should you. After all, in this day and age, content is king!

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