This week I did a presentation to a large wholesaler distributor.  It is always interesting to see real life pains that companies experience. I am sure they are not alone in this.  Here's a list of requirements they asked to ease the pain:

• Corporate item master - flexible enough for various division access levels
• An easy method of building and managing descriptions for an e-commerce solution. The current descriptions they had worked for current customers who knew items by product numbers, but the general public was having a hard time finding what they were looking for. Imagine building descriptions manually for thousands of items!
• A solution that can maintain all of their images and their relationships to the products
• Improved search engine. (support exploded views, fuzzy searching, parametric searching, drill downs, multi-lingual, multi-currency, multi-supplier, etc...)
• Something that can solve the complex product data in their complex ERP system. Almost impossible to find items and get good product data from all the different databases within the ERP! Let alone communicate it to sales channels!
• Punch-out capabilities
• Increase sales and enforced customer loyalty through web and e-catalogs (to supplier networks) and even customer specific e-catalogs.
• Quick and easy access to up-to-date, high quality product information to sales teams for increased profitability.

These bullet points might hit a spot in your pains. If they do, then consider a PIM solution.  

Back to the meeting - when all was said and done, I'm glad to say that we are able to meet these requirements. PIM along with a powerful E-commerce solutions (powerful search engine/webshop). I always like when we can not only meet the requirements but also reveal some other cool opportunities! Unfortunately, sales cycles are so long, so we will have to sit through the suspense...