What is Product Information Management (PIM)?
PIM stands for Product Information Management. At the core of PIM is the work with product data — the data your customers use as the basis for purchasing your products and services.
A PIM system such as Perfion or Inriver ensures that your work with acquiring, accessing, enriching, and publishing product data is as efficient as possible.
By presenting the right product data to your customers, you meet the needs of the 80% of modern consumers who research online before making a purchase. You gain faster time-to-market, more efficient processes, greater data maturity, and far fewer errors. And that shows on the bottom line.
Why is PIM important?
In 2017, The Economist published an article titled: "The world's most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data". It is therefore no surprise that organisations find their volume of data growing every year.
A PIM system gives you the ability to consolidate all your product data in one system, regardless of how many variants, languages, brands, and similar elements your product portfolio may consist of.
With a PIM system, you get a "Single Source of Truth", where all your product data can easily be enriched and used across all the platforms and stakeholders you may have.
Consolidate your product data in one system and get a Single Source of Truth
The primary purpose of a PIM system is to bring all product data together in one central system. This gives you a Single Source of Truth — a single place where product data is created, enriched, and shared from.
In doing so, the PIM system eliminates the risk of errors associated with having product data spread across, for example, Excel spreadsheets and Digital Asset Management and ERP systems. None of these systems are built to handle the complexity that a large product range can contain.
A PIM system is built to communicate data to a range of other channels. It is therefore not a drawback to consolidate all your data in a PIM system. A well-configured PIM solution can easily be integrated with other data sources (such as webshops, social media, industry databases, and more), making import, export, catalogue production, and similar tasks straightforward.