Farewell to Excel: Why You Shouldn't Be Afraid of Implementing a PIM System

How do you manage your product data? While a well-structured Excel template could theoretically capture the key attributes of your items, the limitations of spreadsheets become apparent when your inventory grows, and you need to manage hundreds of item data. Manual management becomes laborious, cumbersome, and notably error-prone.

Introducing a PIM system alleviates these challenges. However, many companies hesitate to take this step due to fear of the complexity of such systems – a concern we believe is unfounded. Therefore, in this article, we aim to demonstrate how the Perfion PIM simplifies data management and how your data can seamlessly integrate into the system.

• Single Point of Truth: The PIM serves as a central repository for your product data, allowing you to manage and synchronize them across all sales channels in a single system.
• Time and Cost Savings: Centralized data management minimizes error sources and significantly reduces your workload.
• Increased Revenue: Utilizing a PIM leads to long-term improvement in the quality of your product data, resulting in increased sales.
• Elimination of Media Breaks: Maintaining your data in one system and rolling it out across all channels ensures a consistent database.

Many companies hesitate to invest in new systems due to fears that they may not yield a return. The implementation of a Product Information Management (PIM) system often falls into this category, given the significant initial effort involved. Not only are there monetary considerations, but your employees also need time to adapt to the new system and incorporate it into daily processes. If the new software were to turn out to be a misinvestment, the damage could be substantial.

However, based on our experience, the benefits of implementing a PIM system far outweigh the risks. Understanding the integration as an investment in the future of your business can alleviate these concerns.
Once implemented, the PIM can serve as a standard system for many processes: no further programming is required. Instead, your employees can independently maintain and manage product data. This fosters a learning effect and increases autonomy within your team, relieving pressure on your development department.

Integrating a standard solution for your company with PIM does not mean sacrificing flexibility. On the contrary, compared to ERP systems, PIM systems offer higher configurability. Your employees can create and configure new fields for product properties as needed (referred to as "features" in Perfion, more on that later). This provides significantly more flexibility in handling product information than ERP systems.

In the following, we would like to show you how easy it is to manage data in a PIM. As a basis, we will be using Perfion PIM. In Perfion, a fundamental distinction is made between Items and Features. Items correspond to the actual, physical product, while its properties are defined through Features. Features can represent various attributes. Let's take a coffee mug as an example. Typical properties would include its color(s), capacity, material, as well as dimensions such as height, width, and depth. Product lines or order numbers should also be defined within a Feature.

Feature Types

As mentioned elsewhere, it is very easy to create new Features in Perfion. Various types can be distinguished, inspired by variables from programming and easy to understand. For example, a Number Feature captures a numerical value, while a String Feature can handle texts. If you simply want to capture the presence of a property (Yes/No), then a boolean Feature is your choice.

Automations (Actions)

One of the greatest strengths of a PIM system is process automation. In Perfion, this is achieved through Actions. Your team can access a variety of configuration options and also integrate external services, such as Google Translator or DeepL for translations. It is now also possible to integrate OpenAI's generative AI and have a product description written based on existing product attributes. This saves your employees a lot of time and improves the quality of your product data.

Inheritance

A feature that can greatly simplify your team's work is the inheritance of Features. You can categorize products and inherit Features for the entire category. For example, if it is defined that a product description should be translated into English via an automation, this command can be rolled out for the entire category, automatically translating all product descriptions.

Administration

Through administration, Perfion offers efficient role management, ensuring that users are not overwhelmed by too many functions at any time. You can restrict your team's rights and only grant access to the functions that are really needed for daily tasks.

Supplier Portal

The greatest time and effort savings come, of course, when you don't have to maintain your product data yourself. This is where the Supplier Portal comes in. If you source your items from manufacturers and/or wholesalers, you can allow them to directly enter their product data into your PIM. This way, you establish a close relationship with your suppliers and receive your product information firsthand.

Many companies fear that their previous investments in product data management will be lost. If this is also the case for you, we can reassure you: your concern is unfounded.

In Perfion, data import and export can be done via Excel spreadsheets. If you have previously maintained your product data using spreadsheets, they can be prepared for import and used as a basis for implementing the PIM. Additionally, Perfion seamlessly integrates into your existing system landscape. If you already use an ERP such as Microsoft Dynamics or manage your product information in different databases, APIs can be used to access them directly. Synchronization between Perfion and the various databases can also be automated, for example, running once daily.

As a leading Perfion partner, ESYON has firsthand knowledge in this area. With our Perfion-2-OXID solution (P2O), we have already developed our own integration that allows Perfion to be connected to the process-stable and highly adaptable OXID eShop.

Time is money. It's only logical that you want to implement your PIM as quickly as possible. Fortunately, integration does not require endlessly long project durations. We can usually implement an initial pilot in just five project days. For the complete implementation of the PIM system, typically 35 days are required. Often, we also realize integration of the PIM with Microsoft Dynamics ERP for our clients, which usually takes about 50 days.