With a Product Information Management (PIM) system, organizations can manage, enrich and publish substantial amounts of product data. A PIM-system acts as a single source of truth within the organization – a central point where all product data is stored and of which you can be certain that the information it holds is both up-to-date and reliable. But why should you use a PIM-system? And what is the impact of a PIM-system on your business? This blog explains how a PIM-system creates value for your organization.
Organizations start using a PIM-system when the demand for more relevant product data is growing, or manual processing of data is no longer tenable. Using a PIM system, you can manage all your product information from one platform and exchange it with other systems or channels. In this way, you have complete control over large amounts of product information and you are no longer depended on different systems.
A PIM-system improves processes
The most significant value of a PIM-system is the fact that it optimizes your company’s processes by gathering all product information and distributing it across the relevant channels. This will eventually lead to the following:
More revenue: with a PIM-system, you can provide more relevant product information to your customers. The more relevant product information a consumer is presented with, the more likely they are to make a purchase.
Lower maintenance and processing costs: the goal of a PIM-system is to enable you to sell more products and lower the costs. Because a PIM-system improves the time-to-market of your products, it allows you to update your data much faster. With a workflow module, departments are no longer dependent on each other. They can retrieve all the information they need directly from the PIM-system and work together to improve data quality.
Ownership and transparency: when using a PIM, you can make departments or employees owner of specific data. This eventually leads to more transparency as it is clear for the whole organization who is responsible for which data.
Fewer mistakes: Excel files are often used to process product information. Besides the fact that mistakes are easily made when processing data manually, it also leads to uncertainty about which file is the latest and therefore the correct version.
In other cases, we often see that organizations who don’t have a PIM-system, use other systems as a substitute. Using other systems as a PIM-system is at the expense of your internal processes. A PIM-system eliminates these errors by offering a central database – this ensures that all data is up-to-date on all channels and internal process are optimized.
Better data quality: good quality of data means that your data is up-to-date, reliable and uniform. When product information is managed in a PIM-system, you are assured that product data is the same across all channels. This leads to improved data quality because any potential discrepancies between various pieces of information will no longer occur.
Work more efficiently with the GS1 data standard
As described above, implementing a PIM-system will optimize your internal processes, creating value in numerous areas. However, more and more organizations and industries work with market standards for product data. This is an efficient way for suppliers to provide their product data to their buyers.
In the Netherlands, GS1 is the most used standard as the food-, pharmacy-, do it yourself (DIY)-, healthcare- and fashion industry use it. This requires a PIM-system that not only creates value.
SRC-PIM is the only PIM-system in the Netherlands that is fully integrated with GS1. With its validation functionality, you have real-time insight into your data and compliancy with the requirements set by GS1.
With SRC-PIM it is possible to manage your data according to required market standards. Moreover, you are in control of your product data, from validation to synchronization. This allows you to be a lot more efficient since it will no longer be necessary to update and upload your data to specific data pools manually.
Curious how this works? Read our free whitepaper and discover how you can manage and publish your data according to the GS1 standard.