When choosing a PIM solution, lot of companies base their decision on partial needs. They decide to buy a PIM solution to solve a particular pain within a department.
- In the case of a home furniture retailer, the IT department decided to go for a PIM solution in order to optimize their database management. They didn’t consider, in their process, the needs and ideas of marketing or sales department
- Some food industries are selecting PIM solution (or so-called PIM) to manage the EU1169 data without having a global view of different rising needs (GDSN, E-commerce, Multimedia asset management
- Pharmaceutical industries choose for each regulation, a product data management solution,
These cases are not exhaustive and I am pretty sure that each reader have faced same issues.
Generally, these projects are not long in facing difficulties: time, budget, resources and ultimately, use and adoption of the tool.
Out of my experience, the successful product data management projects (PIM or MDM) have met the following requirements:
- The PIM is a key element of business transformation: Top management sponsoring and commitment are critical and vital in a product data management project. This will provide the solid foundation for business transformation. A sponsor belonging to the Executive Committee will ensure that the PIM project, including governance and quality, will always have adequate resources and will support the organizational changes that the PIM will bring
- The PIM is a transversal business application: The involvement of correspondents from the various departments, generating and consuming data, will ensure that the PIM specifications take into account the needs of the entire ecosystem of the company, from the suppliers to the customers.
- The PIM should ensure the quality of the data: Governance and data quality are fundamental to the success of any PIM project. It is very important to know the source of the data, its quality and to put in place corrective actions (to correct the current data and to develop a policy of sustainable data quality
- The PIM is a multi-channel publication tool: Knowledge of the multiple and various consumers, the identification of the publication channels will allow to define a coherent multi-channel publication strategy for product content. The PIM will be easily configurable to ensure publication to new future channels.
The choice and implementation of a solution must come after having ensured that those 4 elements are available during the project.
These 4 combined points are foundational for a successful PIM project. These are compulsory crossing points for any business; they could be scalable to adapt to any company size.
They will ensure a broad adoption of the PIM within enterprise, which will be the unit of measure of the success of any PIM initiative.