Your products are core to your business — they’re how and why you exist. And your product data fuels your entire business: it enables your teams, educates your customers, and powers your systems, from financial to operational. Accurate, comprehensive product data is essential for all functions including sales, marketing, operations, supply chain, regulatory and compliance, and more.
Product Master Data management is all about making sure your business has clean, organized, and comprehensive data for every single product. Product Master Data management is a specific subset or branch of Master Data Management (MDM), which has a broader scope beyond product data, such as customer data, employee data, etc. Product Master Data focuses specifically on managing and governing product-related data.
Product Master Data includes three main components:
Product Hierarchy
Supplier Name, Brand Name, Product Name and SKU Name.
Commercial Attributes
Product description, chemical name, technical properties, product family, markets, applications, functions, and dozens of other attributes that are related to Brands, Products and SKUs. This data is typically found in technical data sheets, safety data sheets, brochures, white papers, spreadsheets, and in folders on countless employee computers or shared drives.
Commercial SKU Attributes
Package sizes, lead times, or MOQs, which are typically found in your ERP system.
Product Master Data management is imperative for businesses because it emphasizes collecting and organizing product data. It’s the critical first step in any successful digital transformation.
What is Product Information Management (PIM)?
Once you’ve collected and organized your product data, it needs a place to live — a central source of truth. This is what a Product Information Management (PIM) system is for — it’s the single system of record for your product data.
PIM is the technology that stores all of the Product Master Data including every attribute and associated data sheet or document. Attributes typically include product descriptions, chemical name, markets, applications, marketing attributes, product family, technical properties, functions and dozens of other product attributes typically found in technical data sheets, safety data sheets, brochures, white papers, presentations and a variety of systems. Your PIM system serves as the reference point for all other systems including your ERP, CRM, CMS, and more.
Your Product Master Data is what fuels your PIM system. It’s the foundation. If you put garbage data into your PIM, you’ll get garbage data out. A PIM serves as your reference point for all other systems, both housing and syndicating the information required by your ERP, CRM, CMS, eCommerce system and others. It’s responsible for feeding consistent product information across systems, channels and touchpoints. This is why it’s critical to fill your PIM with clean, organized and structured product data — not garbage. Getting this right is a lot of work.
Product Master Data and Product Information Management are the foundational requirements that enable companies to unlock digital transformation.
