As the landscape of commerce evolves, customers are increasingly seeking innovative and consistently branded encounters across various touchpoints and platforms. In today's fiercely competitive environment, the simple act of listing products on multiple websites falls short. Brands and retailers must now strive to furnish captivating product experiences that feature accurate and up-to-date information, meeting their consumers wherever they engage.
These product experiences serve as the cornerstone of overall customer interactions. A customer's perception of your brand is heavily influenced by their engagement with your products; trust in your products directly impacts trust in your brand.
Product Information Management (PIM) systems like PIMCore, Akeneo, or Censhare empower organizations to efficiently and promptly craft and deliver compelling product experiences. Often integrated with a digital asset management (DAM) solution, they can enhance customer experiences, boost sales conversion rates, and help companies tap into emerging sales channels by ensuring the right content and product information is displayed to customers across commerce platforms and internal users of inhouse systems, in the right place, at the right time. Let us look at some of the key features and capabilities of PIM systems and what to consider when deciding on which solution to implement.
Key Features and Functions of a PIM system include:
1. Data Centralization:
PIM systems serve as a centralized repository for all product data. This data can encompass a wide range of information, including product descriptions, specifications, pricing, images, videos, and more. Censhare for example, arranges and manages all this product information by relating it directly to product groups, families, and variants. Once configured correctly, it automatically links product data to media and product descriptions.
2. Data Enrichment:
PIM systems often allow for the enhancement of product information, such as adding metadata, translations, and categorizations, to make it more appealing and informative to consumers. In Akeneo Serenity EE/GE for example, products can also be enriched with attributes containing data and product information from other locales or channels, or across teams (ie. you are in the e-commerce team and you need the product information from the mobile team). This helps to ensure information consistency across different operating channels.
3. Data Quality Management:
Good PIM systems generally all have built-in, often automated mechanisms to facilitate data cleansing, validation, and standardization to ensure accuracy and consistency in product information. PIMCore’s advanced data quality management framework for example, provides automated validations and obligatory field checks. Users can compute a data quality score for each data object based on predefined business rules, that can then be visualized in the Data Objects editor, grid and/or tree and be used to formulate corrective measures that enhance overall data quality.
4. Multi-Channel Distribution:
PIM systems enable businesses to publish product information across various sales and marketing channels, including e-commerce websites, marketplaces, mobile apps, catalogs, and print materials. Censhare is an omnichannel content platform with natively integrated modules for DAM and Content Management (CMS) and as such can easily distribute product information across a large number of channels including web, mobile, and print. In addition, in the omnichannel era we find ourselves, both Akeneo and Censhare PIM offer content syndication capabilities that are paramount for consistent brand experiences.
5. Version Control:
All three PIM solutions offer versioning capabilities to track changes and updates to product information, ensuring that only the most current and accurate data is used.
6. Integration:
PIM systems can integrate with other business systems, such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) tools, Digital Asset Management (DAM) solutions, and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, to maintain data consistency throughout the organization. All three PIMs Akeneo, PIMCore and Censhare have a large variety of prebuilt API connectors and an open application programming interface to integrate data from all kinds of systems.
7. Workflow Management:
PIM systems often include workflow tools to manage the creation, approval, and distribution of product data, especially in larger organizations with multiple stakeholders. PIMCore solves this with the help of Symfony workflow components, tuned and tweaked to accommodate PIMCore specific features like a Marking Store, Transition Guard (Symfony just calls these Guard Events), and Global Actions, which allows key users to define and design the workflows they need. Censhare has a number of natively integrated, often automated workflows for pushing information and content through the system, or assisting creation and approval processes.
8. Scalability:
All three of the mention PIMs can handle large volumes of data and scale to accommodate a growing product catalog. That being said, the scalability of PIMCore’s solution depends on whether you are choosing a free community model or one of the enterprise offerings. Without going into too much detail – key when looking at the scalability of a PIM is the performance at scale, and the pricing model attached to scaling up or out, as some PIMs charge by the number of users and others by the number of SKUs.
9. Analytics and Reporting:
All PIM systems generally provide insights and reports on product performance, helping businesses make data-driven decisions, but there are notable differences in the offerings. PIMcore is open-source, but designed for wider data needs. As such, it’s less “user friendly” for marketing or product teams, as development effort is needed to create any required reports. Akeneo is built around more specific Product Information Management requirements and the people who use them and as such even less technically-skilled teams can easily create the dashboards and reports they need.
Finding the Right Fit
Overall, a PIM system is crucial for businesses that deal with a diverse range of products and need to ensure that consistent, accurate, and compelling product information is presented to customers across various online and offline platforms. A good PIM simplifies the management of product data, reduces errors, and enhances the customer experience by providing a unified and trustworthy source of product information. It’s easy to use, but not necessarily quick to implement depending on the business complexity and number of products and integrations, and can flexibly adapt to accommodate the changing needs of your business as your product portfolio grows or changes. There is no right PIM – it depends on how you want to use it and what you need it to do.
If after reading this, you know your organization needs a PIM but you are unsure which system is best suited to your requirements, reach out to us and take advantage of our requirements-engineering workshops and readiness assessments. We will figure it out together!