Customer will no longer accept to look up your company and your offering in the channel where you happen to be in today. It is expected that you should be in the channel of their choice. One problem is that many companies do not have the capacity to handle product information at the level required in the today´s digital business landscape. Surveys show that 80% of companies do not have confidence in the quality of their product information.
Being in multiple channels requires a central product information management for cost of maintenance and updating of data in many sources not to soar. In addition, the product information is often scattered across multiple systems which complicates and delays the publication distributed to the various channels.
Therefore, PIM (Product Information Management), is today more than ever important as there are many channels and potential outputs to customers and other actors and the number of channels will increase. PIM will enable combine structure and correctness in product information with the resulting business agility and strategic flexibility in reaching new channels with correct information; time-to-market.
In order to distribute "sellable products" market data must be added to the product information most often found in ERP, PLM, or PDM systems, systems in which the data usually can be characterized as information about a "manufactured product". The PIM system structure and combine aggregated data from ERP, PLM or PDM systems with sales and marketing data and the result is a "sellable" product that can be consumed by such as an e-commerce channel, an extranet, or a mobile application.