Sharing Is Caring: How PIM Promotes Collaboration

That’s especially true in the world of modern omnichannel commerce. Offering customers a compelling experience across the full range of channels available requires teams that are able to collaborate seamlessly — sharing data and expertise at the drop of a hat, working efficiently, and moving quickly to ensure that no time is wasted. eCommerce executives, marketing managers, studio supervisors, and every other member of your team needs to be working together arm-in-arm if your company is to reach its true potential.

But while many may like to describe our modern, tech-influenced world as one that allows, even encourages, cross-functional collaboration, that isn’t always the case. Many data management systems leave product information trapped in silos, inaccessible to many employees who need this information to do their jobs effectively.

Storing and managing product information in spreadsheets, for example, often makes it nearly impossible for all members of your team to access and manage data effectively and efficiently, leading to slower time-to-market and inaccuracies or inconsistencies in product data. Even worse, your team could end up wasting time, working on the same tasks in parallel.

That’s why it’s essential that brands and retailers alike in the omnichannel age rely on dedicated Product Information Management, or PIM, solutions. Applications like Akeneo PIM help your team work together more efficiently by liberating data from spreadsheets and silos, improving access to the most important tool in your omnichannel arsenal: product information.

Don’t believe us? Take a look for yourself at these three ways Akeneo PIM can help your team rise to the top of their field.

Stop Relying On Spreadsheets and Avoid Silos

Outdated and inefficient data management systems like spreadsheets, which leave product information trapped in silos and inaccessible to many employees, are the natural enemy of productivity.

When using these solutions, companies are typically relying on the outdated model of going to market with new products in new channels where each project is managed in a separate environment, with a separate process, by separate contributors working in silos. In the old approach, efforts are duplicated, opportunities for errors are multiplied, and man-hours are wasted on repetitive tasks. These solutions almost always lead to slower time-to-market and more errors or inconsistencies in product information.

Akeneo PIM, on the other hand, is designed to help you achieve organizational excellence by revolutionizing and optimizing the process of taking new products to market, managing a new collection or range of products and updating product details by providing one centralized, trusted source for product information. It does so by providing a single source of truth for product information and assets, improving the accessibility of product data and liberating it from the silo of spreadsheets.

Automate and Accelerate Workflows

Managing product data in outdated and inefficient tools like spreadsheets means that your product enrichment team must waste hours each and every day on repetitive, low-value tasks.

This means they don’t spend their time — and your time — writing creative and compelling product descriptions, producing top-notch multimedia assets, and making sure your customers are greeted with a compelling experience. Instead, they spend it to copy and paste descriptions, categorizing new products, and other time-consuming, repetitive tasks.

PIM takes these tasks off your to-do list by using a business rules engine to automatically populate attribute values that apply across many products and product models. It also helps you manage product data in bulk. This can lead to much higher quality data by removing human error, as well as expediting the enrichment process.

Jumpstart Expansion

Opening a new sales channel or expanding to a new market can put a particular strain on data management systems. When your company expands, more team members need to access and manage product information and assets quickly and efficiently, or risk delaying the expansion and losing valuable revenue in the process.

If your product data is managed inefficiently or trapped in spreadsheets and silos, your omnichannel or international expansion will likely progress at a snail’s pace. Translators won’t be able to adapt content or data into new languages and units quickly, product enrichment teams won’t be able to optimize information or assets to fit a new channel, and your time-to-market — and the success of your new endeavor — will lag as a result. What’s more, as our customer Tarkett discovered, expanding to a new locale without giving local employees a chance to take autonomy of the enrichment process can weaken morale and slow down your processes even further.  

But with the automated workflow and data management features above, Akeneo PIM helps alleviate expansion headaches and sets your team up for success. By giving employees local autonomy over the enrichment process and direct access to the data, information, and assets they need to complete their tasks and execute your team’s expansion plans and automating time-consuming and repetitive tasks, your team can work more efficiently while also improving the accuracy and quality of your product information.

Liberate your data

Liberate your data! Discover how PIM can optimize your product information management process, free product data from silos, and boost your team’s productivity.

Contact us get your PIM project underway, download our eBook Scaling eCommerce to learn more about how PIM can help your business, or check out our blog Winning the Battle of the Brands to find out how to make sure you stay on top of the competition.