A PIM system, you may have heard of this term before. But what exactly is a PIM system, what is it for you and why should you invest in it? On this page you can read everything you need to know about PIM systems. On the left side of the page you will find a table of contents that allows you to quickly jump to subtopics.

If you run a company, you have to deal with an endless amount of data. Especially in the current era, this data is often digital. Consider, for example, the price of the products, but also discounts, product descriptions or the availability of a physical product in your warehouse.

Without a PIM system, you store all this data as texts, tables, images or multimedia files. You do this partly in an ERP system or in endless Excel files, for example. The information therefore ends up in different places and eventually forms endless chaos. Not so handy! That is why you prefer to collect this data centrally in a PIM system.

A PIM system stands for a "Product Information Management" system. In this system you can centrally collect, manage and publish information about your products. That is super handy, because product data no longer fragments. With the help of a PIM system you keep everything consistent throughout the lifecycle and sales process of a product. And that too in a clear way!

 

 

PIM system for marketing & sales

Product information is crucial for purchasing decisions

The battle to win customers, both B2B and B2C, is often a battle for information. Today, consumers do extensive online research before making a purchase decision. And the more and better product information is available, for example in the webshop, the greater the chance that the consumer will make a purchase.

ERP information such as internal product numbers and other terms are linked in a PIM system to user-oriented descriptions that are available to everyone in the organization. This way you keep the quality of your product information high and within reach.

Qualitative product descriptions are key for several reasons:

It ensures a better SEO score, making your products easier to find.
Good product descriptions build trust, making a customer feel safe when making a purchase.
A good product description prevents disappointment for the buyer and ensures that your products are returned less often.

In addition, we are switching more and more between channels nowadays, so that as a company you have to ensure a consistent presence on those channels. This is also called omnichannel or multichannel marketing.

In any case, it is important for your organization that the various channels can be managed efficiently and that the customer receives an optimal and consistent customer experience. This requires a strong piece of data management, to deliver consistency on the one hand, but also to show flexibility and speed on the other.

Always up-to-date product information

Not only does a PIM system offer the possibility of consistently, flexibly and quickly displaying correct product information to the consumer via various channels. This also applies to the sellers. By giving them access to a PIM system, they always have access to the information they need to help and advise potential customers. Without being dependent on the marketing department to produce presentation material.

The seller can generate unique brochures and price lists, adapted to the specific needs of the customer. The seller simply chooses what he wants to use and which products he wants to present.

A PIM system also makes it possible to work with differentiated prices. You can place the agreed price agreements in the marketing material, which reduces the margin of error. The big advantage of a PIM system is that you can be sure that you are working with current, updated data. The seller avoids the risk of making an offer that is riddled with errors (think outdated specs or incorrect pricing), which would otherwise embarrass the seller and make the company look unprofessional.

 

Enables international growth

Growth can be achieved in a number of ways, but for many companies, expanding into multiple markets – often through e-commerce – is the obvious way to scale.

Globalization often also means working in multiple languages, and each time a language is added, an extra layer of complexity is added to the marketing effort. In practice, it is impossible to conduct efficient e-commerce in multiple languages manually.

This is where the PIM system shows its value. It enables clear processes for translating, updating and publishing data, so you can have products in multiple markets just as quickly as if you were working in one language. Your time to market is therefore considerably shortened!

A larger assortment without increasing stock

With a PIM system you can grow your company's assortment without having to increase stock or add unnecessary products in the ERP system.

By creating the products in the PIM system and keeping them there, you can market them on an equal footing with all other products and only transfer them to the ERP system after sales.

This applies in particular to wholesalers, but also to other companies with a large assortment. For example, DIY centers often benefit from being able to market more products than they have in stock.

 

Optimize your internal processes with a PIM system

You actually want to solve a certain problem with a PIM system. It is usually mainly about making all your product information clear. How much added value the PIM system has for your solution depends on:

The complexity of your product information;
The number of desired publishing channels for this data.

If you have a lot of or very complicated product information, a PIM system will therefore yield a lot of profit. However, PIM can also help with a smaller product range. This is the case, for example, when you publish product information often or through different channels.

 

Shorter time to market

Most companies operate in a dynamic market, where both development and customers move quickly. Time-to-market is a crucial competitive metric here. PIM optimizes time to market by streamlining the product journey from development to production to marketing and sales.

The process of releasing a product from development to marketing unnecessarily lengthens time-to-market. A PIM system optimizes the process considerably.

In a PIM system, employees from several departments can work on the product at the same time, so marketing can start producing brochures, leaflets, catalogs, etc., even if not all product details are finalized yet. When the production department updates the information in the central database, the information is also updated in the relevant catalog.

A PIM system therefore not only helps you store and sort information, but also publish it, which involves both offline and online 'publications'. For example, you need the information for your website and for e-commerce purposes, but also for your catalog and on your price lists and quotations.

The PIM system also automates part of the collaboration with translation agencies, making it easy to keep an overview of which product texts have been sent for translation and what their status is.

The translations can then be delivered directly to the PIM system. Similarly, the PIM system streamlines a number of manual tasks that would otherwise slow down the process of bringing a new product to market.

 

More efficiency through automation

When a new product has to come to market, questions always arise, which usually take a long time if there is no proper process for it. When you structure your data in a PIM system, you eliminate all back-and-forth communication between departments.

Never again: “Is that price right?” Or.. “Do we also have product X in color Y?”.

It becomes easier to delegate responsibility and the individual departments can simply concentrate on their own core tasks and be sure that the rest of the company will do the same.

E-commerce becomes easier with a PIM system

PIM is often mentioned in the same breath as e-commerce, and there are many good reasons for this. When a company adds an online store to its other sales channels, the marketing effort immediately becomes much more complex and demanding. E-commerce is by nature the digital exchange of information, which makes PIM relevant.

But it is the multichannel dimension that is especially crucial: if you only sell through an online store, it will often only be possible to manage the products in your e-commerce platform alone.

E-commerce requires high speed and therefore a system that can efficiently support the creation and enrichment of the data for individual products. Informative and selling product information makes the difference for an online store. When you sell to multiple countries, in multiple languages, it becomes even more important to have a central location to manage all product information. Editing manually in fragmented systems will be way too much work.

Example of how a PIM system can support e-commerce:

• Fast import and processing of supplier data.
• Enrichment of product information from suppliers.
• Simple translation of product texts.
• Control over how the information is categorized and displayed with respect to advanced search and filtering.
• Efficient processing of product images, videos and other types of media.