5 obstacles that keep a manufacturer from selling more, and how to remove them with a PIM system

Product information first appears in ERP (short for enterprise resource planning)

The more sales and distribution channels involved and the wider a manufacturer's product range, the harder it becomes to update information about those products.

When responsibility for information has historically been split across dozens of systems, people, and positions, any change depends on technical and human factors. For example, a stationery manufacturer has launched a new line of notebooks, pencils, and erasers featuring cartoon characters.

First the company reached an agreement with the rights holders of the characters as copyrighted works, then the designers created a new design.

Production printed the covers and bound the notebooks, applied the design to the pencil barrels, and made erasers in a new mold.

On the signal, the sales department must send information about the new product to all distributors and partners, noting separately that sales should ideally launch in late July, because August is the peak season for children's stationery. The e-commerce unit must update the information on its own website and on marketplaces.

Marketing needs to shoot promotional photos. And so on - the list of required actions can be endless.

Each of these actions depends on a range of conditions and circumstances. Here are some examples.

Who should report the changes or new products, and when?

Who should be in charge of making the changes?

What happens if the responsible employee goes on vacation or misses the signal?

Who do you ping on the partner's side?

What do you do if D-day has passed but the information on the partner's site or on the marketplaces still hasn't been updated?

What do you do if production of stationery with a new design has already started, but the promo materials for it aren't ready yet?

If this process is not digitized, with no defined deadlines for each stage and no tools for control, validation, and feedback, there is a high chance that one of the mandatory actions will not be carried out.

The information will not reach some distributors, or the new notebooks will be published on marketplaces without preview images.

A PIM system makes it possible to digitize the business process of working with product information. How does it achieve this?

Assigning roles and granting those roles specific rights and areas of responsibility.

Each role can edit a limited number of fields; the rest are view-only.

Mapping the business process of working with product information inside the PIM system: the sequence of actions, who is responsible for each stage, and what the outputs of each stage can be. The product information management business process in the PIM system accounts for many scenarios: adding and removing a product from the assortment, approvals, certification, and any edits.

Tools for validating and verifying changes: you can assign who must validate each change, how, by when, and against which parameters. And information on the sales channels no longer has to be updated manually at all: as soon as a change is made and validated, a trigger fires in the PIM system that launches the automatic update of product information on the sales channels.

Suppose you want to enter the Turkish market - your niche there is relatively open, and there is demand for the product, as confirmed by market research.

Or even better, a potential distributor has contacted you and is ready to take the product on consignment.

But there is a catch - the distributor's representative asks you for a catalog with names, specifications, ingredients in Turkish, and prices in Turkish lira.

If you do not have a PIM system, product information is most likely scattered across the ERP, spreadsheets of the commercial and sales departments, and the marketing department's folders of photo and video materials…

In our experience this situation is typical: each department stores the part of the product information it is directly responsible for.

To assemble an up-to-date catalog, the manager has to go through every information source, compile them into a single file, translate everything into Turkish (for example, with an online translator) and convert all the prices.

With a PIM system, the process looks different.

The manager does not have to gather the information again, because all product information is already stored in a single source - the PIM system.

Up-to-date product images are gathered right here, in the product cards.

There is no need to request them from the marketing department.

Most PIM systems support multilingualism and price conversion into different currencies. For example, Pimcore supports these features even in its base version (Community Edition).

This means that building a catalog in the required language takes just a couple of mouse clicks: add attributes for the description and composition and launch automatic translation for the needed products or categories.

In the same way, prices can be converted in a couple of clicks.

A catalog can also be generated as a PDF using basic PIM system functions. In Pimcore, this feature is provided by the Gotenberg microservice, and in Akeneo by the Akeneo Product PDF Generator module.

In total, building and exporting a tidy, complete, accurate catalog in the required language will take the manager one working day at most.

We will not discuss product quality issues here - they are outside the scope of this article.

Let's focus on how product information shapes buyers' expectations. Imagine: a buyer needs a dresser that will fit perfectly into a niche 135 cm wide and 50 cm deep.

Among a thousand models, he finally picked your dresser after seeing its dimensions: 125 × 135 × 43 cm.

A few centimeters difference in depth does not bother him - after all, the drawers are pull-out.

The purchase is paid for, the dresser is delivered... but then it turns out that the dealer somehow specified the drawer width without accounting for the outer case, and the wall thickness still has to be added on both sides - 1.2 cm each.

The review is now there, and it will affect all subsequent sales.

With a PIM system, the impact of the human factor is minimized.

You decide which information is sent to the sales channels and in what form.

Data is automatically transferred from your PIM system to the systems of dealers, marketplaces, etc. in the required scope and format.

To do this, views (child cards) were created within each product card for each marketplace.

The views account for the marketplaces' own requirements for how information is organized — for example, the image format or how overall dimensions are recorded.

Colors highlight identical information that is presented differently across marketplace standards.

Yet in fact it matches, which rules out confusion and any mismatch between the buyer's expectations and the goods they receive.

Each product comes with dozens, and sometimes hundreds, of media files.

These are product photos and videos, PDF manuals, licenses and certificates, patents, advertising and marketing materials. Most of these files have restrictions on their territory of validity (CIS certificates won't be valid in India, for example) or on time.

Contracts with models from ad shoots have a limited term; the product packaging design shown in an ad image changes; certificates and licenses expire on schedule, or these documents may be revoked for other reasons, and the product must be recertified.

To keep both you as the manufacturer and your distributors free of problems or fines, you must carefully ensure that only current files are used. That means regular checks in your own systems and drives where everything is stored, plus constant contact with the distributor: does it have everything, is it using the right photos and videos, are current certificates posted on its site, and so on.

This control demands considerable effort both on your side and on the distributor's side.

But even then you are not safe from errors caused by the human factor. For example, before deploying PIM and DAM systems, one of our clients paid up to RUB 3.5 million a year to the celebrities and modeling agencies involved in its ad shoots.

Simply because regional offices unknowingly used photos in advertising that, under contract, were not meant for that region or for that specific ad medium, as well as materials whose usage contracts had already expired. And that's just the advertising materials!

The consequences of using outdated certificates can be even more devastating for both reputation and sales.

With DAM (short for digital assets management)

) working with media files becomes even more controlled.

While in the PIM system itself any media file is merely an addition to the main product card, in DAM it is a standalone unit of content.