PIM for Suppliers - How PIM Manages Supplier Data?
These days many businesses and enterprises never hesitate to experiment with their physical and digital commerce capabilities to understand the modern customer’s behavior and to meet their expectations. PIM system delivers a supreme, solid and centralized data management solution for enterprises to boost their sales, productivity and to succeed in Omnichannel commerce.
However, a question may arise on how an organization can handle product data information onboard by multiple suppliers. Well, the PIM system provides the best solution for that too.
This article elaborates how PIM effectively manages and organizes the product data content onboard by multiple suppliers.
What PIM System Can Deliver To a Business?
Product Information Management (PIM) is the ideal choice for businesses on solving all those challenges faced in managing and organizing product data. Here are the few attractive benefits delivered by a PIM system to businesses.
- Easy to Import & Export Data from a centralized location
- Onboarding Data with Proper Validation
- Context-sensitive UI with Simplified Drag & Drop Features
- Well Optimized & Digitalized Product Catalogs
- Data Syndication with SSOT
- Seamless Data Distribution Across Multiple Channels
- Easy to Customize
- Automated Process
How Does PIM for Suppliers Help in Product Data Management?
Data governance becomes essential for businesses these days, for effective data governance efficient data management is mandatory. PIM system offers a platform that delivers user-friendly, accurate handling of product data along with providing needed data management for all businesses.
Here are the few attractive features you can find in PIM for suppliers that manage product data effectively.
Data Editing
PIM system allows enterprises to organize, aggregate, and classify the onboarded supplier data. In addition, it allows users to add product attributes, descriptions, relate relevant data, create product documentation, and so on.
Batch Editing
PIM system allows its users to do bulk editing or multiple actions on the stored product data in a centralized location. Users are provided with features like various sorting, filtering, and inline edition options to carry out such batch editing.
User & Rights Management
PIM platform enables business leaders to assign usage rights to the users according to their roles. This forces low-access users to seek permission from their leaders to access vital product information.
Customized View
PIM system allows business leaders to customize the view of the product according to the role of the users. By doing so, leaders can avoid data exposure to external stakeholders.
Publishing & Versioning
The supreme governance policy of the PIM system along with the well-structured data workflow allows business leaders to gain full control over the product data. This enables leaders to schedule publishing features along with quick rollbacks to the previous print version of product data.
Do you want to build a product information management (PIM) for suppliers that contain all the above-listed features and streamline your product data management operations?
Maintain Supplier Data With PIM for Suppliers
For many enterprises and organizations, PIM acts as a driver and provides valuable insights to the business, and fuels it towards the success path. In this digital era, enterprises truly depend upon technologies for collecting data and managing product information and other valuable business data.
Apart from delivering easy to manage and enrichment of supplier data, PIM acts as a tool where business leaders can depend on for the accuracy and consistency of data quality.
Here are the key features provided by the PIM for suppliers platform.
1. Role-based Access To Users
Multiple systems and users share the centralized location used by the PIM system to store product information or supplier data. This allows external users to access the core information easily and it may lead to data mishandling and poor data quality.
To avoid such a typical situation, the PIM system offers special features which allow business leaders to assign roles and restrictions to the users on accessing product information collected from suppliers or vendors. This ensures product information or other supplier data which are stored in the centralized location are maintained in accuracy and high quality.
2. Data Validation
Suppliers and vendors usually send information to organizations in various formats, managing and organizing those will be a tedious job for business leaders. Many companies suffer from handing supplier data onboarded in different formats. A good PIM system eliminates this situation by providing data validation features.
The data validation feature of the PIM system allows suppliers and vendors to upload data in uniform format as per the standard assigned. In addition, the PIM system implements automated management and regulatory process of those supplier data and ensures data are error-free.
3. Data Discipline
Data discipline lays a strong foundation for businesses to gain a positive reputation. It would be time-consuming for an organization to collect, organize, and manage all data from various suppliers. If the product data information is more complex then it will take more time to organize it.
A good PIM system fastens the data collection, organization, and managing process of the product data collected from various suppliers along with proper validation. This ensures businesses & enterprises get properly validated high-quality product data from the supplier end.
Also, the PIM system follows a good data structure which makes business leaders map data fields between multiple suppliers and inter-relates it with perfection. The multiple channels supported by the PIM act supplier portal and give flexibility to business leaders and suppliers. Suppliers upload the product data through the supplier portal, and the portal takes care of the remaining process of storing those data in relevant fields of the PIM system automatically.
Do you want to harness the potential of all the above-listed features by implementing a tailored product information management solution?
PIM for Suppliers – 6 Best Practices to Consider
Modern companies focus more on gaining customer loyalty to improve their customer base. Having a good PIM solution would be handy for enterprises to empower their product information and to tell more compelling stories to customers across multiple channels. This may lead to gaining customer loyalty.
Before getting into the best practices, let us illustrate the 4 important pillars for PIM’s best practices first.
4 Important Pillars for PIM’s Best Practices
Get The Right Tool Based On The Requirement
In general, the necessity of PIM often gets started from the needs of product sales, and marketing departments. So, enterprises should pick the PIM system that can bring various departments of an organization like sales, marketing, production, and IT under one platform and drive them towards business goals. So, you should be determined on how the PIM system is going to achieve your business goals and objectives.
Set Clear Your PIM Vision
PIM would be the perfect trigger point for your business evolution. Apart from just maintaining and enriching product data, PIM helps enterprises & organizations to take bold decisions on expansion.
A good PIM system helps organizations to create a strategic plan for clearly communicating and to express the time-bound vision to the workforce.
Cultural Transformation
An organization or enterprise involves a wide range of departments internal and external wise. There may be employees who work for the same organization without knowing the vision of the business.
This creates a significant lack of productivity and data accuracy, to sort down those issues, business leaders who take initiatives to provide proper training and workshops to all works to empower the workforce working together to achieve business goals.
Considering Customer Experience
Product information plays a key role in building customer experience, so a company must focus on amending the importance of a specific product with its information. Customer behavior in modern days becomes unpredictable, so every department of the organization or enterprise should keep customers as their first preference.
Well, those are the four vital pillars that every enterprise or business should give importance to before narrating the best PIM practices.
PIM system is well known for delivering an array of benefits in sectors business scope, needs, positive impact among vendors, suppliers, partners, and how it creates engagement with the end-users. In addition, a PIM system should be approached with 3 major standpoints as listed below.
- A Technology Platform
- A Way of Working
- A Business Enabler
If a business fails to lead the PIM system without keeping those standpoints, then chances are high for the business to lose the direction towards its success & growth.
6 Best Practices of PIM for Suppliers
Here are the lists of highly recommended best PIM practices to follow by businesses to avail highly optimized and enriched product data/information that can drive customer journey from discovery to sales.
1. Establishing Requirements for Products
Product information should be built based on market analysis and competition. For creating content for a new product, you should go thorough review of the product and should provide an appealing summary.
Having a good product vision helps a lot in creating very attractive and appealing product content. With proper implementation and enactment plans, business leaders can create and enrich their product content through the PIM system.
2. Improving Product Catalog Structure
A company’s catalog structure is often considered as the center of focus for finding the product information. In addition, catalog structure plays a key role in delivering content on a variety of channels in a clear manner. A good PIM system will have the capability to improve product catalog structure according to the formats of channels.
Take a look over the features that a product catalog should have.
- A product catalog structure should suggest alternative products to the buyers
- A product catalog structure should include product categorization and attributes in detail.
- A Product catalog structure should have the ability to include specialized attributes according to the channels.
- Finally, a product catalog should include pictures and videos of a product along with its high-quality descriptions.
3. Integrating Product Information
When it comes to data management solutions, data integration is the main aspect to be considered. Data integration features consolidate the scattered product information in various systems together in a centralized location.
Apart from just interconnecting multiple systems together, a good PIM system should come with prolific data integration features along with the ability to format data scaling without any errors.
4. Optimizing & Enriching Product Information
Product content plays an important role in gaining a competitive edge in today’s heavy competitive market. A good PIM system should have the capability to optimize the product content and enrich by converting those product digital assets images and videos into high-resolution with catchy descriptions.
Well, content optimization will lead the business to experience high traffic from search engines and various channels. Here are the lists of a few areas business leaders should focus on while optimizing their product content.
- Optimizing content according to SEO standards
- Optimizing product content according to the needs of channels based on proper & regular monitoring.
- Planning and optimizing content based on the current market demands.
- Customizing product data to drive the attention of the target audience.
5. Improving Customer Experiencing
PIM system helps businesses to create a complete product story through its optimized and accurate information without any errors. Also, it assists businesses to deliver the product story where the potential buyers are. This would help businesses to drive the attention of the customers towards their product and increase the likelihood of product purchase.
Apart from just focusing on managing product data/information, the PIM system acts as a tool and empowers the workforce to deliver engaging and relatable product stories for creating a better CX strategy.
6. Choosing the Right PIM Software
PIM software delivers a wide range of business benefits to the organization and enterprises. To make sure all those benefits are fully utilized, organizations or enterprises must choose the right PIM software. By the way, choosing a PIM system is a daunting task for many small-scale businesses and even for enterprises.
Business leaders should be familiar with what they are looking for and should have the below-listed checklist before purchasing PIM software.
- Choose PIM solution based on Users
- Determining the management functionalities of PIM
- Determining data distributing features
- Determining the ability to edit huge files
- Data security & Easy accessibility features
- Easy Integration
Are you looking for a technology partner that helps you build a robust PIM solution by following all the practices listed above?
Bottom Line
PIM plays a key role in connecting various dots of a business and drives it towards growth by drawing the insights of the stored and organized information of a product. Businesses use the PIM system to collect and manage supplier data which plays a critical role in business growth. So, businesses should be aware of using the PIM system wisely to gain more benefits.
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