Back in 2012, the Goodmasters research company estimated that
it takes an average of 25 minutes a year to collect and update data about one SKU. It is still relevant for non-core systems and applications. The speed of data entry, for example, in Excel is slightly affected by the product version used by the manager.
If a company has 100 SKUs in their catalogue (which happens, though not very often), the time wasted on operations with attributes can be neglected. And what about companies that have more than 1000 SKU?
Even if there are 5000 SKU, the figures will be quite impressive. A few calculations will give us a total of 12 staff months per year spent on the manual data processing. In other words: there is an employee, who spends ALL their working time on product data processing!
Large catalogues result in greater maintenance costs and higher risks of human failure in maintenance. Most business processes are implemented in people's heads, instead of data systems. The data quality decreases whereas the time to market increases.
The PIM system (product information management system) automates your product information management: control of filling in, updating, versioning, sending and receiving data, data searching, etc. According to the research previously mentioned, the PIM system implementation
reduces the time for collecting and updating data about each SKU to 4 minutes per year which is six times quicker! Also, the time to market for particular products is reduced by 3-4 times. Another important thing – the data quality improves significantly.