Retail consumers today want to make informed decisions about their purchase. In addition, the increased product assortments and channels make managing product information in traditional systems such as spread sheets, PDF, ERP etc. a daunting task. Consumer experience is a critical aspect for the retail industry to gain and retain customer loyalty.

To enhance consumer experience, the product information throughout the consumer journey and across channels should be complete, accurate, relevant, engaging, and consistent. Variation in content across different marketplaces for the same product, content quality issues, inconsistent formats, and missing attributes negatively influence a consumer’s purchase journey, thereby affecting brand image and customer loyalty. Hence, ‘product information management’ (PIM) has become integral to an elevated consumer experience across channels.

What is PIM?

Product information management is a process of collecting, curating, enriching, quality checking, and managing all product data required to publish, promote, and sell products across channels. The combination of appropriate service layers and platforms enables efficient product information management.

How does PIM work?

PIM creates a centralized repository forming a single source of truth which enables creation and distribution of product catalogue across different ecommerce and sales channels. Product categorization based on various attributes, hierarchies and business rules can be automated through this single source of truth.

Categorization on the basis of product line, product category, product size, and product color enables configuring the PIM tool to automatically classify a product into multiple hierarchies and represent them in appropriate nodes of the hierarchy along with reprenting relationships across these hierarchies through business rules. This can greatly help product managers as well as consumers.

Who needs PIM?

PIM is needed across the distribution chain by:

• Brands and manufacturers: These are the original data source of the products. An efficient PIM tool can help open up new sales channels and reduce time to market especially for organizations looking to increase their geographical and channel footprints.
• Distributors: As the middlemen in the supply chain, distributors manage high number of SKUs and distribute to multiple channels. Hence, it is important to keep pace with the ever growing universe of SKUs and increasing information requirement from different channels.
• Retailers: The retail world is moving to an omni-channel model where the consumer expects a consistent elevated consumer experience which is channel agnostic. PIM helps retailers in offering a consistent consumer experience across physical and digital touch points.

How does it help?

There are several business benefits of having the right tool with a well-trained PIM service layer such as:

• Enhanced customer experience
• Cost optimization
• Decreased product returns
• Faster time to market
• Increased product assortment
• Customization and localization enablement
• Increased sales due to more conversions and cross sell as well as upsell opportunities
• Reduced turnaround time due to automation
• Error reduction with single source of truth
• Data and analytics driven decision making
• User friendly for internal stakeholders with enhanced productivity
• Workflow enablement through business rules, creating efficiencies

The combination of appropriate data, scalable platform, and a well-trained service layer enables retail and consumer packaged goods organizations to elevate consumer experience at every consumer touch point while creating efficiencies. The result is increased customer satisfaction, reduced cost, increased revenues, and eventually better profits.