A product is an article or substance manufactured or refined for sale. Product is the essence of any trade or commerce between the buyer and the seller. The product information is critical regardless of whether it is a consumer product directly consumed by the buyer or an Industrial product that goes through a manufacturing process. The Product design teams, the Engineering teams, the Manufacturing teams, the Suppliers of the Parts, the transportation teams, the storage locations, the sales associates, the marketing team, the payment providers, and the services team all contribute to the enrichment of the product information. Siloed product data in different systems for manufacturing (ERP, Inventory), the supply chain that provided the product parts, sales and lead management (SCM) tools, customer service data (CRM), and digital marketing or experience platforms (DXP) end up complicating the product data accuracy.
Before selecting a PIM tool, I already have many acronyms and a few more to understand. All the below tools support Product Information Management (PIM) systems, and there is an overlap between the PIM products that provide these capabilities in the current market.
Master data management (MDM), Product Experience Management (PXM), Digital Asset management system (DAM), and Product data syndication (PDS) systems support the PIM platform.
Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions help brands identify, innovate, and launch engineered products. They also track the product lifecycle and help remove underperforming products from the market.
A Master Data Management (MDM) tool connects product information to places and people. It contains the product's SKU, name, description weight, dimensions, and parts/materials.
A Product Experience Management (PXM) tool improves the customer experience of the product information via contextual offerings and personalization. It stores the marketing message, product features, benefits, and cross-sell/upsell information. They also manage Product data syndication (PDS) with other systems like social channels, digital shelves, print catalogs, point of sale, and marketplaces.
Content Management systems (CMS) provide marketing descriptions and materials supporting sales and marketing teams.
The Digital Asset Management (DAM) platforms help maintain the product images, documentation, video, engineering drawings, and other digital assets related to the product.
Commerce Platforms help categorize the products in the stores, set up the pricing model, associate the shipping model, and provide the shopping cart and checkout experience.
Firstly, A Microservices-based Composable Product information platform with headless architecture and event-driven synchronization can only provide such functionality in a scalable manner. Composable PIM tools offer flexibility, agility, time, and cost benefits and provide the flexibility to support changing business conditions.
The second important feature is that a product information system (PIM) should support event-driven data synchronization to provide consumers with the correct data at the appropriate time with the right message. The PIM aggregates the data and acts as the single source of product information for use in multichannel commerce and data exchange.
Other factors in selecting a PIM, one should watch out for the following,
Currently, there are multiple PIM tools with the unique and same time, overlapping business capabilities. Organizations must select a tool that helps in creating a frictionless checkout process. With predefined template-based experiences, the flexibility to make the 1-1 experience is jeopardized. A headless PIM architecture provides the flexibility and agility that allows organizations to provide a dynamic experience. The cloud-native headless products are Pimcore, Akeneo, BetterCommerce, Salsify, Bluestone PIM, censhare, Unbxd, Inriver, and others. Some products cover the entire spectrum, some focus on syndication only, and some with their niche. When choosing the appropriate tool, it is best to consider the organization's business context and current capabilities.