A personalized guide to mastering product data in a changing world.
Your business is increasingly challenged by data growth and complexity. How quickly your organization can make accurate product information available and actionable to all stakeholders in a cloud, on premises, or in a hybrid environment determines your performance and ability to compete. Poor data quality can cost millions of dollars in lost shipments, slipped product launches, bad designs, rework, and missed revenue.
This digibook offers best-practice insight and personalized learning paths by business process, role, and industry to help simplify and streamline your approach to product information management (PIM). Discover how accurate product data can enable your supply chain initiatives or path-to-cloud strategies to accelerate innovation, decrease the cost of quality, commercialize new products faster, and drive revenue.
Accurate product data is your organization’s informational lifeline, allowing key stakeholders to make the right business decisions in a dynamic marketplace. Best-practice PIM provides your business with a 360-degree view of all product data to make your digital transformations possible.
From disruptive innovations to simply keeping the lights on, every organization relies on accurate and timely product information to make everyday decisions. This includes everyone from C-level executives who develop organizational strategy to users who continually utilize product information for development, marketing, supply chain, and enterprise operations.
Aberdeen Group carried out a recent survey and found that "best-in-class organizations using product information management (PIM) are outperforming their peers in virtually every aspect of their business." Read the full report here
Figure 1: Supply Chain Product Information Management in the Cloud, Aberdeen Group, 2017.
| Performance Advantages | PIM Users | No PIM | Performance Difference |
| Production Output | 19% | 4% | 4.7x Greater |
| Product Launch Rate | 3% | 2% | 55% Higher |
| Inventory Accuracy | 7% | 4% | 75% Higher |
| Customer Satisfaction | 10% | 7% | 45% Higher |
As data continues to grow exponentially, businesses struggle to align people, processes, and technology to satisfy stakeholder expectations. Disparate data escalates the challenges of capturing and utilizing the right information. Without a cloud strategy that begins with PIM at its core, companies cannot harness the full capabilities of maintaining clean and accurate data to speed time to market, increase revenue, and exceed customer expectations.
To keep up with the competition, companies are moving key systems to the cloud to uptake the latest best practices, speed operations, lower costs, and improve agility. Aberdeen says that “nearly 60 percent of all companies report that their data infrastructure resides primarily in the cloud, or in a hybrid-cloud/on-premises environment.” As business processes become more complex and new technologies (such as the Internet of Things (IoT)) emerge, organizations are relying on a hybrid or complete cloud architecture that must scale to accommodate rapid growth.
Traditional systems and manual processes no longer offer sufficient control. Decision-makers need access to accurate product information from anywhere at all times to drive business value. A best-practice PIM solution allows you to aggregate, enrich, validate, and share the product data required for your sales and marketing, supply chain, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) processes, ensuring your products are ready for today’s global market. A cloud-based PIM solution provides a highly effective foundation for moving all critical systems into the cloud, and plugs and plays without business disruption or the cost and burden of having to customize your existing supply chain, ERP, or customer-experience (CX) architecture.
We’re expecting a reduction in issues related to data quality of up to 25 percent. That improved data accuracy will prevent a lot of downstream problems, and help us get to market quicker. It was so easy—just configure, load your data, and go. Updates roll out regularly.
—Jamie Hornstein, Director of IT,
Ainsworth Pet Nutrition
Without an effective way to manage product master data, cloud promises often fall short. By embarking on a strategic path to the cloud that begins with a purpose-built PIM solution, companies can connect infrastructure in any environment with a common digital thread of master product data that links on-premises, hybrid, or cloud. This means there is no need to replicate item data or build costly new integrations to run your end-to-end processes.
Aberdeen found that companies moving their PIM solution to the cloud were “23 percent more likely to trust the accuracy and completeness of their product data.” A product master data foundation in the cloud provides a low-risk high-reward scenario for cloud adoption—potentially within six months of implementation.