Product Information Management: How PIM's Workflow Management Boost Productivity?
Over the years, businesses around the globe managed their business data manually but now the situation has changed dramatically. The manual method of managing business data becomes time-consuming and obsolete. Literally, it becomes impossible to keep track of all those thousands of data records and to provide a better customer shopping experience with those track records.
To sort out those difficulties, modern businesses prefer to manage their vast amount of data electronically / with the aid of technology. That’s where the concept of PIM (Product Information Management) software evolved and very soon it became the most convenient method of storing, retrieving, and accessing all the business data in quick time.
Let have an overview of the points that we are to cover in this post.
Table of content
- What is a Product Information Management (PIM)?
- What types of data managed by the Product Information Management solution?
- Challenges faced by businesses on not having a proper workflow
- Benefits of implementing workflow management
- What Is PIM Workflow Management?
- PIM workflow management – key highlights
- How PIM workflow management boost business productivity?
- Purpose of Product Information Management
- Boost productivity through Product Information Management workflow
- Simplification of productive activities
What is a Product Information Management (PIM)?
PIM (Product Information Management) is one of the platforms which is specially designed to store and manage all types of product information.
A PIM system uses a variety of feeds for storing and retrieving the desired business data. All those feeds are listed below for your reference.
- Excel sheets/Spreadsheets
- Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERPs)
- Product Lifecycle Management (PLMs)
A PIM system is specially designed to collate all product data in one location and to distribute those via various channels like an online eCommerce store, apps, and so. Having a PIM system will be really useful for any business because it improves business productivity and boosts the conversion rate significantly through streamlined workflow and reduced product time-to-market. Besides, businesses can achieve greater ROI by handling product data effectively.
What types of data managed by the Product Information Management solution?
As mentioned earlier, a PIM system is designed to store and manage all types of product-related data. Here we have enlisted a few of them for your reference.
- Attributes of all business products (including product descriptions, titles, and so)
- Product images or videos
- All product’s marketing information
- Product specification details (size, shape, materials, and so), and more…
By offering a platform to store and manage all these product data, PIM delivers efficient workflow management. The workflow management of a PIM system helps business authorities or managers to create or customize their business workflow in order to boost organizational productivity.
Yes! You heard it right, PIM boosts productivity through its efficient workflow management.
Challenges faced by businesses on not having a proper workflow
It is essential for every business to follow certain protocols and workflows in order to run the business operation smoothly. Without workflow management, businesses may fall into a typical situation where it requires facing severe management challenges. Here we have listed a few challenges for your references.
- Difficulties to manage product data consistency
- Complexity in distributing the quality and consistent product data across multiple teams within an organization
- High risk of getting miscommunication between teams or across an organization. This may affect business planning processes.
- Having improper communication within the team regarding product/business data may lead to affect the production timeline and planning schedule.
Apart from those, it would be really hard for the product managers and for the marketers to create an efficient campaign without having consistent product/business data. Also, improper product information creates confusion for the customers while they interact with the products. Eventually, it affects customers’ overall shopping experience.
Are you facing any such challenges or other issues that make you realize you need to consider workflow management for PIM?
Benefits of implementing workflow management
Visibility: Detailed product information along with relevant documents gets desire visibility in multiple devices. Besides, proper communication and progress reporting can be done within multiple devices at any time without any hassle.
Control: Workflow Management reduces risk and boosts work efficiency by offering desire control on the proper distribution of workload in-between teams based on their capabilities.
Efficiency: Improves work efficiency of an organization by streamlining business workflow along with the implementation of automated operations like approval, reporting, and so on. By doing so, unnecessary delays caused due to manual operation is eliminated.
Flexibility: Having Workflow Management will enable managers to receive day-to-day reports. Besides, it offers a business strategy to the manager that needs to be taken in time to increase the chances of improving business operation.
What Is Product Information Management workflow management?
Product Information Management Workflow Management is a coded system that allows business authorities to implement, manage, and execute business workflow comprehensively. Moreover, the workflow management in PIM is driven by an automated engine that simply eliminates all the hassles of manual operations, especially on giving approvals and sending reports.
PIM Workflow management gives the manager the power to set custom business workflow as per the business need.
Product Information Management workflow management – key highlights
The workflow management in the PIM solution allows enterprises to set their own business workflow and modify the workflow right from drop-down selections. Thus, it will be easier for enterprises to keep up with their business operations.
Here are a few more key highlights of PIM’s workflow management
1. PIM workflow configuration
PIM’s workflow configuration allows enterprises to configure multiple workflows based on the available PIM elements. The entire configurations of the PIM workflow take place on the basis of the Symfony configuration tree.
2. Events
Managers can get several events from PIM’s workflow management and all those events are customizable and extendable according to the desired functionality.
3. User Notifications
It has a feature of sending notifications to the users whenever a transition occurs through email or PIM system.
4. Workflow History
The Pimcore system has the option right under the “Notes & Events” tab where users can easily get the list of entire actions taken over the object.
Image Credit: Pimcore
5. Workflow Overview
The system provides an additional tab for every workflow configured for a PIM element. In that additional tab, workflow details like place, graph, and all other details will be listed.
Image Credit: Pimcore
Do you want to get better insights into the technical aspects of the PIM workflow management module?
How Product Information Management workflow management boost business productivity?
A workflow is a program that identifies tasks in the process sequence, which informs team members when a task is essential. When an individual completes his role, the workflow is shown to be complete so that more work can be carried out and authorized.
Automation, efficiency, and productivity are the core concepts of a workflow. Everybody in the workflow has access to other activities so that projects are carried out promptly.
Product Information Management (PIM) Software can be interpreted and periodically updated by members of the company. PIM’s workflow allows companies to store and update information for everyday tasks when required.
Purpose of Product Information Management Workflow
Product information remains consistent across multiple channels through you process the data from a single platform. For instance, advertisers and manufacturers use the same data. If a user modifies the product data, it reflects in real-time, and all the users can access the updated information.
PIM software may also schedule reminders for companies using these data.
The purpose of integrating these data is to allow all parties involved in the distribution and marketing process to access them easily. This function improves the cross-channel distribution and minimizes errors.
PIM software can be very useful for large companies with high amounts of data. Also, small businesses would be astounded as the PIM Boost productivity.
PIM boost conversions and revenue
PIM will increase the conversion rate by 20-50 percentages, which leads to substantially higher profitability, sales, and success. PIM boosts productivity since one of the critical ways of driving a customer’s sales is to maintain a consistent impression and experience across multiple sales and marketing channels as described earlier.
The provision of the same product experience for a consumer through social media, ads, websites, and stores is vital for brand image and customer loyalty. It is very essential for the success of any retail business.
Flexible workflow management with PIM
PIM’s workflow management contains an automated engine that lets you describe, manage, and operate the workflows. It enables product managers to identify and model workflows according to their needs, set a deadline, have a better view of information flow, undertake an audit trail, minimize risks, and increase timeline estimation.
Effective workflow management of PIM allows managers to build and customize workflows as required to increase accuracy and productivity.
Product information workflow management
Brands have a better chance to communicate with consumers directly. But the growing number of touchpoints raises the risk that consumers will become frustrated or confused by too much conflicting product content.
Product data is typically hierarchical. Accessing product data must be supervised among product managers, legal teams, marketing and sales teams, etc. Workflow management is essential for aligning procedures, schedules, and workflows across teams.
Boost productivity through Product Information Management workflow management
1. Start reducing the use of spreadsheets
It will take hours to import the product description data into a spreadsheet manually. This method causes human errors due to incorrect information being entered. PIM helps in making product data accurate.
By entering mass product data and building workflows, users save time with PIM. For instance, you can set up a PIM workflow for authorization to update critical attributes. This allows you to share the correct information across the respective departments in a simplified way.
2. Keep in touch with group members
Cooperation among team members is necessary for any business to improve organizational performance. Users can interact across the departments in a PIM structure. This allows team members to update user details and ensures that all members are on the same page.
3. Automation is excellent
A significant benefit of PIM technology is automation. Companies can automatically generate information from various sources instead of manually extracting data.
It would be best if you focus on writing informative descriptions instead of worrying about where the data are. In this way, you can create better product experiences. This results in improved experiences with consumers and greater returns on investments.
PIM automation facilities also include the creation of customized networks. The channels can operate from eCommerce sites. PIM’s workflow management makes it simple if you want a new product to be distributed for a track.
4. The life cycle of a single product can be observed
Businesses must look at a product from the beginning to the end, to maximize their data power. Users will see the degree of completeness for a product through PIM technology. The PIM framework guides users through every step of a product life cycle ranging from image updates to SEO titles.
This methodical idea makes product data more accessible. Before an item goes to the market, businesses should have all the necessary information. This will lead to higher efficiency for companies. This is because they have full control over the life cycle of a product.
PIM also provides dashboards that display every product in a complete overview. Users will see what products are available for sale immediately. If it’s a product on Amazon or through the smartphone, your visibility is perfect.
5. Cost saving
Accurate data decreases the risk of incorrect product sharing of information. The data in PIM are configured through delivery methods, procurement procedures, and stored stock. As PIM solutions are easy to incorporate and allow to automate most of the workflows, businesses save money on management and manual ways of marketing.
Do you want to increase the overall organizational productivity of your product-driven business by implementing a robust PIM?
Simplification of productive activities
Workflow management framework enables businesses to take advantage of powerful automation technologies. For example, manual data entry tasks are replaced by an automation solution, which collects and enters data into a centralized data management system.
A process management system greatly improves employee efficiency besides saving time and reducing errors. You are secure with understanding what tasks you have to do and enjoy working on tasks that make the business more profitable. Employees are now better able to control their time and communicate efficiently around the organization.
Bottom line
Organizations face more complexity and challenges than ever before. Using an integrated solution, such as workflow management they can experience unmatched flexibility and reliability for their businesses.
The centralization of product data & images is extremely important and helps in various ways to speed up the process. If several users and multiple teams work together to create the product content in the PIM solution, the proper workflow is necessary.
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