Whenever I get to spend time in nature, I am very grateful. On the one hand, I find myself, slow down and also feel a certain kind of gratitude for being able to experience it.
But I also find the time to think about what makes my professional life so exciting and challenging and what exciting tasks still lie ahead.
It feels like everyone is talking about the importance of a PIM or a DAM. The saviors for maintaining product information and providing it with marketing content and then presenting it to the customer on the various channels. But are a PIM or a DAM really the savior for maintaining our increasingly complex product data?
The IT and marketing departments of many companies are looking for solutions to prepare their content in a targeted manner. The main focus is on product data that needs to be enriched, prepared and distributed for the various marketing channels. This includes product images in various formats, product presentations, 3D animations, prices, etc.
This also includes product descriptions in the form of short and long texts, marketing headers, translations and much more text.
The different product variants (colors, shapes, lengths, sizes) must also be taken into account. In addition, price information, article numbers, EAN, GTIN, SKU, barcodes, labels, awards, fits and certificates are also required.
In short, there is an ever-increasing flood of data and information that belongs to a product today.
Added to this is the updating of this data by the manufacturer, via Excel, portals such as GS1 or interfaces such as Datanorm, and many other sources of supply that are needed today to present the product to the customer with all the relevant information.
In the future, the EU will also introduce its CSDDD legislation for many European sales markets. The additional flood of data that will have to be maintained and managed at product level will therefore increase many times over.
Many customers are trying to bring a lot of this data and requirements into the existing ERP systems, where, once viewed neutrally, they do not actually belong. As a result, ERP systems are becoming ever larger and increasingly complex and the project, update and maintenance costs for downstream operations often exceed the planned budget or are simply too expensive. As a result, ERP systems are often misused for other purposes and are becoming increasingly difficult for users to understand and operate.
In turn, the marketing department cannot use this data to process their product-related marketing campaigns, as the ERP systems are not designed for marketing requirements and the data is therefore stored there in isolation.
This quickly gives rise to the idea that you also need a PIM to collect all relevant product information in another central location, where it can be processed by the relevant product managers on a product-related basis.
But can the marketing department use and process this data for itself? Often not, as even these systems cannot meet the specific requirements of a marketing department, or not sufficiently.
So an additional system is required for the marketing department, such as a DAM or a MAM or a CMS.
This is where the marketing department can take action, but has to face the challenge that not all the data associated with the product is available, but only the data that is to be used for the marketing tasks. It is written, supplemented and maintained by hand. This often results in different product content in different systems, which often cannot be used across companies.
We therefore have product data in PDM, PLM, ERP, PIM, DAM and CMS and in many other places where product data is needed and must be made usable, and each person responsible starts to edit and maintain their data individually for their area. I am deliberately ignoring the required variety of interfaces and complexity here.
Welcome to the software silo of modern times. What was once a hard disk has now become a piece of software.
The classic ERP, PIM, DAM and MAM systems all fulfill their own specific purpose, but do not help the company, the product managers, the buyers and the marketing users to achieve fast and complete transparency of the product data that is important to them. An urgently needed collaboration between the persons responsible for maintenance is complicated.
Over time, a landscape of systems and solutions is installed in an attempt to enable the marketing department to promote the product to the consumer in a presentable way in order to increase sales and sales volumes. The operation of these systems and their communication with each other in turn costs licenses, resources and money, which is increasingly no longer feasible in the tight budgets of companies due to falling margins.
The company's sales success lies in the completeness of its product data, the cost efficiency of maintaining this data and the speed of product presentation to the consumer. As a rule, this results in faster sales and therefore market profit and success for the individual company.
However, the daily challenge on the way to meeting the above-mentioned requirements lies in having a central overview of the entire product data, processing it, expanding the content quickly and flexibly and presenting it promptly at the customer touchpoints, often with increasing operating, project and software costs of an ever more complex IT system landscape.
But what if there was software that was precisely designed to capture and consolidate all the necessary data associated with the respective product, to enrich the product data with additional ERP content, to aggregate it and then to automatically or systematically forward this collected data to the various consumer channels according to sales requirements?
Software that takes over communication with all relevant external information systems, relieves the ERP systems and their interface complexity and distributes only the required or absolutely necessary data from the collected data to all relevant systems in a targeted manner or, if necessary, takes over the tasks of a PIM system at the same time? A central collection, maintenance and distribution point for product data, information, images, certificates, batches, sustainability information, etc. in a graphical interface to meet the complex corporate requirements with regard to product maintenance, marketing tasks and channel or campaign planning and to provide employees with a quick and transparent product overview. Employees receive a transparent, comprehensive overview of all product-relevant information and can decide which of it can and should be used for marketing purposes and which should only be stored or passed on for internal purposes. By integrating AI-supported processes, work tasks such as product recognition, product description, keywording and translation are largely automated. External service providers and suppliers are integrated on a task-related basis via a browser, meaning that all product-relevant data and information is stored exclusively within the company.
Would this solve the current complexity of product data and its time-consuming maintenance?
I believe so, it just requires the courage and the will of those involved to get an overall picture of today's product data structures and data silos and the willingness to rethink. I call this piece of software Heartpiece and I am grateful to be able to work on it every day.