Blog » 5 Key Use Cases for Implementing a PIM
A Product Information Management (PIM) System serves as a single, unified source of information for all your products. It can collect, manage, and distribute product data across different channels, resulting in streamlined operations, enhanced efficiency, and higher profitability.
Five Compelling Use Cases of PIM
Below, we explore five compelling use cases that underscore the importance of implementing a Product Information System.
1. Centralizing Product Data Management
One of the most straightforward use cases for a PIM is centralizing and streamlining your product data management. Businesses often have their product data scattered across multiple platforms, making it difficult to maintain consistency and accuracy. Multiple teams may be responsible for various market segments or product lines. Teams often develop ‘functional silo syndrome’, defined as when your team is working in isolation or a vacuum. Notably, "Thirty-one percent of operations departments (including sales operations and marketing operations) rely on spreadsheets." According to Emma Brudner spreadsheets lack version control, lack user accountability, are not secure and often spreadsheet users end up with multiple versions of the "truth".
By design, a PIM serves as a single source of truth, ensuring that all product data, such as SKU numbers, product descriptions, specifications, images, and prices, are stored in one place. This centralized system allows for easy access by multiple users, tracks edits and version control, and provides consistent data dissemination across various channels, from e-commerce platforms to physical stores, ensuring brand consistency and reducing the chances of errors and discrepancies.
2. Streamlining New Product Launches
Launching a new product requires coordination across multiple departments, from product development to marketing. A PIM can expedite this process by storing all the relevant product data in one place, allowing for real-time updates and smooth collaboration.
Once the new product data is uploaded into the system, it can be simultaneously distributed to all sales channels, eliminating the need for manual data entry on different platforms. Moreover, the PIM can manage and update product variants, options, and bundles, streamlining the overall process of launching complex products.
3. Enhancing Omnichannel Experience
In 2024, it’s not enough for retailers to have a presence on different channels; they need to be able to sell across all channels seamlessly. To do that, brands need to ensure their content is consistent, compelling, and connected anywhere their audience finds them. Customers today interact with brands across various touchpoints. A PIM can help businesses deliver a seamless omnichannel experience by ensuring product information consistency across all channels.
With a PIM, you can instantly update product information across all your sales and marketing channels, including your website, e-commerce platforms, social media, and physical stores. This ensures that your customers receive consistent product information, whether they're browsing your e-commerce store or checking out your latest social media post, enhancing their shopping experience and increasing their trust in your brand.
4. Boosting SEO Performance
Well-organized and rich product data are crucial for optimizing your product pages for search engines. A PIM can help boost your SEO performance by ensuring your product information is comprehensive, accurate, and up-to-date.
It can help manage key elements, such as SEO friendly product descriptions, meta titles, meta descriptions, and URLs, ensuring they're optimized with relevant keywords. Moreover, by providing a consistent product information structure, a PIM can help create a positive user experience, which is an important factor once you understand how search works and the importance of "quality of Content" and "Usability of Web Pages"
5. Improving Product Data Quality
Product data quality is crucial for creating a positive customer experience and building trust in your brand. With a PIM, you can set data quality rules and perform automated data checks, ensuring all your product information meets the required standards before it is published.
One way to manage data quality is to define the appropriate product attributes for the product lines and product categories in your PIM. Product attributes can be used for product filtering and improve and enrich the consumer buying experience. The clearer product attributes and product data for those attributes are defined the higher the quality of product data stored in the PIM.
By flagging incomplete or inconsistent product data, a PIM helps you maintain high data quality, improving the customer's shopping experience and reducing the chances of returns and customer complaints due to inaccurate product information.
PIM - Real World Example
Hussmann Corporation, a leading provider of commercial refrigeration solutions, approached Systems Online to enhance their aftermarket parts data and improve the customer experience on their e-commerce platform. Systems Online collaborated with Hussmann to implement a Product Information Management (PIM) solution, guiding them through the process and highlighting the benefits it would bring to their organization. PIM offers a user-friendly interface with multiple views for effectively managing product listings, descriptions and attributes across various marketing channels. It empowers businesses to enrich product content by efficiently defining, comparing and tracking the completion of attributes. The PIM tool also includes the ability to import data from multiple sources and asset management capabilities that allow easy storage and access to digital assets like product images, user manuals, installation guides, and more.
By leveraging PIM's extended attribute management features and OEM cross-reference compatibility, Hussmann was able to significantly enhance its product catalog. This enabled them to overcome one of their major challenges - delivering consistent fitment data for their wide range of products. Once Hussmann understood the advantages of implementing PIM in terms of enriched product data quality and improved customer experience, they quickly shifted from asking "What is PIM?" to eagerly enquiring about the implementation timeline. Overall, PIM proved instrumental in helping Hussmann manage attributes effectively while ensuring accurate fitment information across their diverse product offerings.
PIMInto PIM allowed Hussmann to enrich product content and offer complete product fitment using the PIM as the central source of truth with live product attribute filtering. Two weeks after switching to PIM, Hussmann reported that the eCommerce order count had increased 71% over the same time period from the prior year.
Conclusion
In a business environment increasingly defined by digital transformation, a Product Information Management System can provide the critical infrastructure needed to manage product data efficiently. By centralizing product data, streamlining new product launches, enhancing omnichannel experiences, boosting SEO performance, and improving product data quality, a PIM can significantly enhance operational efficiency and customer satisfaction. As such, it's not just a nice-to-have but a must-have in today's competitive business landscape.
Modified on: 04/19/2024