Companies worldwide struggle with inconsistent, inaccurate, scattered, and unreliable product data and are often unaware of how to leverage product information as an asset. Without the ability to manage product information optimally, organizations lose margins, customers, and market share and increase time-to-market compared to the competition. Errors and manual tasks increase costs and revenue is lost due to failure to meet increasing sales channel requirements. The cost of bad data can be devastating as it multiplies across the enterprise and through the value chain.

With ERP systems maintaining transactional data, reporting data and product catalogs, often organizations consider themselves PIM enabled.  This causes a shortfall as the ERP base has gaps in managing product information to meet the most pressing business needs today.

Why?
Master product catalogs within ERP systems lack the ability manage the complexities of maintaining higher product data quality centrally. Typically, data is owned by various groups and thus applications are developed to view the data single-dimensionally. Also, mergers and acquisitions result in multiple databases that can take years to consolidate and frequently never fully merge into one central manageable repository. Often product data is created and maintained based on these individual groups and platforms resulting in disparate applications and views of product information within the ERP, none of which have a complete perspective and can be leveraged across the enterprise. These limited views of product data in turn lack the ability to maintain multi-dimensional data and the ability to repurpose the data for various use cases.  Furthermore, ERP systems support limited data types and export formats and are unable to meet the growing varieties and complexities of sales channels today. A true PIM solution can support any type of information from structured to unstructured and also export information in any fashion necessary to maximize opportunities in all channels.

ERP systems do not meet the pace of business today when handling product information.