In retail and manufacturing companies product data
management has interesting challenges. There are many off shelf products
claiming to be having PLM (Product Lifecycle Management), PIM (Product
information Management) and MDM (Master Data Management) features. With this
different acronyms and features it is very confusing for many IT/Business
executives to make a right choice to fulfill their business needs. Let me try to put some clarity around these,
to help for better decision making process.
Product Life Cycle Management (PLM)
applications are primarily focus on design, development and refinement process
of the products. In manufacturing vertical the features may include product
design, specifications, development cycles, packaging, customer trials, approvals
process and much more. Most of the product research development business units
of the organization use this toolset to manage the products. In retail vertical the PLM means vendor
selection, product approval process, product configuration changes, product
/packaging redesign as per their business needs and workflows between the departments
are part of it. Both Retail and Manufacturing verticals the focus is to have a
well-defined process to make products designed and made available for sale.
Product information management(PIM)
applications are focus on providing information about products in all channels.
Current retail world is selling products in many different channels (E-commerce,
Mobile, catalogs, instore and more) and each channel might have different set of
needs. This can be complicated further with usage of multiple languages and
demographical/localization needs.
Spanish customer want to see Spanish content of the product than English
and similarly product pricing or dimensions could vary by country (product
pricing in their own country, or dimensions in Feet vs meters).Need of the hour
is that all channels need to have same accurate information with centralized
content management. There will be needs of work flow management where different
marketing /sales department are involved in generating/managing the content or
doing a quality assurance of information. The product information can be
received from vendors or product information syndicators like GS1. For a
manufacturing vertical these application involve in sending the product
information to product information consolidators or their product distributors
or sellers. The PIM systems still used
by business users in marketing and sales departments with very little
involvement of the IT departments.
Product MDM (Master Data
Management)
These applications focus on providing limited set of product data used with in the
internal operational and analytical systems and eliminating duplicate product
ID’s/SKU’s. The focus of MDM to have golden copy of product data by
consolidating product records from multiple source systems (There could be
different Product ID’s (Even SKU’s) for different channels, regions or
subsidiaries). Mostly these data is
actionable for the analytical systems for decision making. Eg.: a clothing
retailers could see pattern of more red
shirts or sold vs blue. Electronics retailer could see there is more demand for
40 inch T.V. than 65 inch. The Product
MDM will be able to link all source identifiers to consolidate to have single
version of truth in operational systems.
See Below illustration of how these three application suits
fit in an enterprise (Retail or Manufacturing)
Does Enterprise Need Three different
set of Tools ?
Given how these three different tool sets focus on different
business needs is an enterprise need to have three product suits to manage the product data or can they
leverage one product for all the needs is a frequent question asked by business
and IT executives. The answer to this question varies by organization and their
data quality. PIM and MDM have some
common features, so if there is well established product ID and SKU management
with very little duplication then a PIM can work for both Information and
mastering. But if there is concern of data duplication with different product
keys then the organization will benefit having both products. Also with
enterprise moving to multi domain MDM solutions then PIM will focus on
information management and product mastering will be part of multi domain MDM.
Similar if the current product lifecycle management process
is well defined with some custom build application then there might not be a
reason to change it unless it improves the performance of the business units.
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