Aug 23, 2022

Treating your PIM solution as any other IT project may be a big mistake. Getting information management right is about a lot more than software implementation. Here are three ways to avoid the common pitfalls in Product Information Management.

Your Product Information Management (PIM) solution is an incredibly important part of your business. Many companies gloss over the value that the right PIM system can bring though.

A lot of them also fall into the trap of overly focusing on software implementation. But getting Information Management right is about a lot more than that.

Learn three ways to avoid the common pitfalls in Product Information Management.

1. What Comes First in Product Information Management – Strategy or System?

It may be to state the obvious, but let’s be clear about this one: You should always start with strategy.

Think of it this way – you wouldn’t buy a tool without knowing what you wanted to do with it first. You need to know how to use it and where to apply it to get the most out of it.

As with any business decision, you need to be clear about what you want to achieve through Product Information Management so that you invest in the right things. For example, you may want to sell more, increase efficiency, get product to customers faster, or provide richer content.

You wouldn’t buy a tool without knowing what you wanted to do with it first. You need to know how to use it and where to apply it to get the most out of it.

Once you know what your goals are, analyze what is stopping you from realizing them. Is your product presentation to customers lacking? Is the quality of your product information poor? Is it contradictory? Is your processing too slow? Are you missing mandatory product information?

This will tell you where to focus your investment so that your Information Management processes actually support your business ambitions. The good thing is that a PIM solution is a very agile system. This means you can start with something that fulfils your immediate needs, is easy enough to understand and not too costly, and then add to and develop it over time.

Once you know what your goals are, analyze what is stopping you from realizing them.

2. Make Information Management Part of Your Whole Business

An Information Management solution is not an isolated part of your business. If you consider exactly how many departments in your business are involved in adding to your PIM, gathering information and enriching it, and using it, you will quickly realize just how integral effective information management is.

You have all the departments that create content such as purchasing, product, marketing and media production. Then there are all the departments that consume that content and the different end customer touchpoints that benefit from richer information. For example, in many companies the only information that customer support can access is on the website. A good PIM system makes all the difference here.

Where many PIM projects fail is that top management decide they want to improve the business and hire an IT partner to implement a tool. The work is done in an isolated bubble with a very small mid-level management team. The risk then is that when they present the final solution to the end users they find that it doesn’t suit their needs at all. The end user doesn’t understand the change, it’s harder to work with the tool, or it makes their life more difficult.

When you implement radical change, people can lose their sense of control and understanding. This can be scary and make them resist change. By involving people from across the entire business from operational level to middle management to top management, you can make sure that change is accepted – and adds business value.

Commerce Talk

What Should Come First in Information Management?

Listen to our PIM expert as he explains why you need a solid strategy in place before kicking off your next PIM project.

3. Don’t Overlook Organizational Change for Successful Product Information Management

Many businesses may understand that strategy is important, but they often overlook the organizational change and change management that needs to come with it.

It’s easy to think that your business runs smoothly and is well coordinated but once you start trying to implement change you soon realize that there are silos, inconsistent ways of working, and the same content being created in different departments.

As an example, one UK company analyzed how much time their marketing department spent each week trying to source marketing materials and discovered it added up to £500,000 a year. Making an organizational change clearly had a huge financial return for them.

By not putting in place the right organizational structure to support it, you are minimizing the value your PIM solution has to offer.

Not only that, by not putting in place the right organizational structure to support it, you are minimizing the value your PIM solution has to offer. And this can add up to a lot when you consider what centralized, accurate and up to date information can do.

The other side of this is that you can’t rush the implementation of a PIM solution. You need to take the time to work with your information management partner to make sure you get things right.

For example, at Avensia we discuss what you need, why you need it, and all the ways this could be achieved. Once we understand this, we can implement a PIM solution that fits your unique needs.

Once you go live, it’s just the beginning. You need to keep adapting your Information Management solution and learn how to make it better as new requirements come along. Having the right organizational set up is integral to long term success.

If you need help getting access to reliable, consistent and up to date product data wherever your business needs it, get in touch. We’ll help you create a PIM solution that gets the most out of your product information.