Overview of PIM

Lets’ say that your business owns over a million product SKU’s, its attributes, digital assets and other varied product information. Consider the product information updates that you are likely to receive in various formats from your vendors, suppliers, customers, sales team and employees as you sell your products across multi channels. Managing huge product data manually like Spreadsheets, PDFs etc., can be a herculean task; not to mention the data discrepancy and the time involved. This could potentially lead to bad customer experience and loss of sales. In order for customers to make better product purchase decisions whether it be B2B or B2C, it is important to have rich and reliable product information across channels. This is when PIM comes into play!

PIM also known as Product information management is the process of managing all the information required to market and sell products through various distribution channels (Source: Wikipedia) With PIM solution in place you can centralize your product data, create, aggregate, manage, enhance, distribute it with ease.

How can PIM influence the automotive aftermarket industry?

It is an understatement to say that the automotive aftermarket industry has gone through a revolution. Automotive Aftermarket Industry Size is projected to reach USD 551.92 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 3.38% (Straits Research).

Organizations in the automotive aftermarket must adhere to the Auto Care Association (ACA) standards which help businesses communicate with each other effectively. The aftermarket product attribute data and product fitment data receive regular updates from automotive industry. With change in data format, best practices, organizations have to update internal templates ensure that the product mapping is compliant. Staying up-to-date, trying to maintain data integrity, can be time consuming. Using PIM to manage aftermarket data standards can result in the following benefits:

1. Data accuracy – Prior to using PIM, data had to be searched and gathered from different sources. Now you can create & manage data from a single source thereby ensuring data accuracy and use the available information to meet ACA standards with ease.

2. Data Integrity - . Using standardized product data from a single and centralized repository can provide reliable and consistent information for customers across various channels. This would positively impact the overall customer experience

3. Data Quality – Provide in-depth product information which can help customer find their ‘right product’ with ease, there by reducing operational costs

4. Improve product sales – By PIMs integration with multiple online ecommerce platform(s) we can distribute the product data in required format with ease, thereby increasing sales volume

5. Reduce Time to Market newer products – Introduce newer products in the marketplace from PIM with ease.

6. Collaborate with ease – You can simplify the on-boarding process for data providers

7. Streamline Workflows – Create workflows to define ‘what is to be done’, ‘who is to do’ and ‘when it is to be done’ to achieve business goals. This can eliminate manual operations and thereby reduce risks

8. Reports & Metrics – Generate custom reports and metrics to see where the business stands and try different marketing strategy.