Our 8 essential tips before launching your PIM project

Your company has decided to switch to Product Information Manager (PIM) ? We congratulate you and encourage you in your decision. It's good to know that it's not a trivial process, and will require investment on the part of your team, as well as a great deal of patience and apprehension to ensure a successful transition. After that, you'll be in for a treat! To help you make the transition, we'd like to give you a few essential tips to bear in mind consider.

1. Determine why you want to move to Product Information Manager (PIM)

If you're looking to make this transition, it's likely that you're looking to solve a problem that PIM could address. Although it may seem obvious, it's essential to identify this problem and understand how the Product Information Manager could help you achieve certain objectives that you've defined with the rest of your team beforehand. It's important to remember that PIM is not a tool for solving IT-related problems, but for contributing to your company's success through managing your data effectively by helping you solve certain problems.

2. Integrate, educate and coordinate your teams during the implementation of the PIM

To coordinate your teams and educate them about Product Information Manager, it's essential to define precise roles for each user of the tool. Beforehand, you need to identify the people who will be using the PIM. All this is to ensure perfect supervision and implementation. Efforts will be concentrated, and the efficiency of its use can only be of the highest quality.

3. Free up time and resources

It's essential to define a schedule, and stick to it as far as possible. This will ensure the efficiency of your PIM platform. Involve all stakeholders in the planning process, and give them enough leeway to give constructive feedback on the strategy for using Product Information Manager. Finally, try to leave time for the implementation of data models and their integration into the process.

4. Think big and think future!

In most cases, we found that the PIM solutions that had been implemented had been designed to manage only basic data, limited ranges, etc. It's better to take a long-term view and think about a different strategy. Take into account the future needs of your business and integrate them as early as possible into the Product Information Manager tool (supplier and customer base data, etc.).

5. Involve all entities in the company

It's important for all departments to work hand in hand and cooperate when implementing the PIM tool. In most companies, everything to do with data management is handled by a single department. In the case of PIM, we need to see it as a resource, a corporate asset which must therefore be handled by all entities for the Product Information Manager to function optimally.

6. Have high ambitions but always work in an organised, step-by-step manner

It's important to have a long-term vision and a certain ambition when it comes to using PIM . However, you need to keep things in perspective, and always work in stages. Initially, you'll need a healthy dose of realism about the time, money and coordination required to achieve the desired objective. When you touch and modify the PIM solution solution to achieve the desired objective, deploy it step by step to ensure success at every stage of the process. You won't frustrate your current employees, or potential future ones, and you'll be better able to assess your monetary and human needs.

7. Dedicate a team of specialists to manage the data repository

We saw earlier that all your company's departments need to work together to implement Product Information Manager. However, for for data repository managementHowever, when it comes to managing the data repository, it's advisable to leave it to a specialized team who will spend their time solely on this subject. Once the PIM is in place, nothing will be more important than the management of your data, and it's important that it remains of the highest quality, of great value to your company as a whole.

8. Test, adapt, test!

When the process of integrating Product Information Manager into your company begins, it will bring with it a series of decisions to be taken in line with your initial business and PIM optimization objectives. You'll need to carry out a great deal of testing and fine-tuning in order to be as effective and efficient as possible, with your business objectives always in the back of your mind. Test, improve, adapt to your business! These are the keys to success when using a PIM solution.

Conclusion

Every business has different objectives, different challenges and therefore the PIM installations, too, differ between two businesses. However, these best practices are general and apply to everyone, and have proven time and time again in the past to help implement Product Information Manager and speed up the process.