The business drivers for implementing PIM are many but the qualitative benefits may often be equally as important.
We’re often asked by clients “How will PIM benefit my organisation?”and in asking that question they are usually looking for assurances or examples of returns on their investment, “you can save 25% here, improve this by 30%, reduce that by half”, and so on. Whilst quantifiable benefits are available and often quoted – based on the learned experience of others – they don’t paint the whole picture. Equally, what applies to one client implementation is not necessarily transferable or to the same extent to other clients.
For instance, a reduction in translation costs may be symptomatic of more than one particular factor – the client may have switched translation supplier at the same time as automating much of the content extraction and import, or they may have outsourced the translation to a broker for the first time ever, preferring in the past to handle translations in-house.
Qualitative Benefits
Despite evidence of the quantitative benefits, a client’s decision to implement a PIM solution can still come down to gut instinct, or an emotional feeling “that it’s just right for my business”. The business drivers for implementing PIM may be many and varied (and dependent on the client’s industry), and if you choose the right solution then, apart from the payback on your investment, the qualitative benefits may often be equally as important.
Here are just some examples of those harder-to-measure benefits:
- Improved staff moral from the use of a collaborative and intuitive PIM solution
- Reduced stress and absenteeism from working in a more effective and productive manner
- Enhanced information quality and consistency
- Ease of scalability in entering new markets or increasing product assortment
- A modern user-friendly solution for working with product information
- A clear and uncomplicated data model
- Your webshop updated with product changes in almost real time
- Working in a continuous product enrichment process instead of catalogue cycles
- Self-service access to product data and company-wide collaboration
- A fully controlled and managed set of marketing processes dedicated to PIM
- Systematic integration from ERP and PLM through PIM to eCommerce
- A more rewarding customer experience
- Ease of range planning
The case for PIM
Most clients viewing PIM are doing so for the first time, this despite the fact PIM solutions have been around for more than a decade already. In the late ‘90s and beyond, everyone made a mad dash to web-enable their product range, and much of their focus since then has been outward looking at the markets – they may even have updated their back-office ERP systems in that period too.
But what most have failed to figure out successfully yet is how to join up the dots and fully integrate their complex Marketing processes. The operational efficiencies achievable by combining basic product data from ERP with the Marketing department’s vast image repositories and the product text enrichment needed for eCommerce are simply passing them by.
So if you haven’t done already, “Stop! Take a breath, and have a good look at PIM!”
Also read: Supplier Onboarding Demystified
Also read: Why PIM is of growing importance
More tips? Downlaod our guide below. It's pretty useful!
