Where do you store and process the supplier-article data?
Now this is quite a data-technical question. One for the experienced data-PIM (Product Information Management) architect. A question however that many companies will have to answer to play in the modern era of online sales.
Let me fist give some context: product sales companies promote their products, in catalogs, in a CMS-based promotional site, a webshop, the Point-of-sale system, etc.
This data has to be stored somewhere in the companies' systems.
Until a few years ago the question where to store it was easy. Via EDI or incoming files the product data would be imported into the ERP.
The ERP would be the single source of truth about article-number, product dimensions, prices, descriptions, etc.
In the mean time ourwebbased sales channel has multiplied the amount of attributes per product. Added promotional information, visual representations, etc. This is well beyond the capabilities of the average ERP. Try using the product description of an ERP-based product in your webshop for instance.... It probably shows an alldescriptive name in capitals that no customer will ever use in Google.
So point one to consider is: we have to store many attributes that a classical ERP was not meant to hold and maintain them.
The maintenance is more intensive, quite often bulk-actions. Many more products enter the systems when we start engaging in the popular longtail way of doing business.
Probably you will onboard articles in categories you have never before handled in your systems, or will never hold in stock at all.
Point two to consider: products online are not necessarily held in stock or in your ERP.
Maintaining this additional product volume and the attributes regarding promotions is important given the immediate visibility form your customeres and cost-intensive! It requires maintenance functions for translations, promotion rules and the commercial representation of your products. Again a domain the is not part of a typical ERP system.
Point 3 to consider: maintaining commercial product representation requires specific PIM-functionalities.
Given the grown demand on product information, companies raise the demand on the suppliers. Suppliers need to provide good quality pictures, solid product feature descriptions etc.
However, although this is a cost reduction possibility for the company, now the need rises to consume that stream of incoming data and process the pictures, dimension attributes etc.
And with the evolution of products coming available transparantly in the supply chain, the amount of potential suppliers grows, increasing the need to connect more suppliers. These suppliers all provide different data, varying in quality per attribute and per source.
New demand: manage a multitude of product sources.
Point 4 to consider: maintaining products from multiple sources with the ability to be selective using programmatic rules rather than doing manual labour is required, including storage and maintanance of images.
Let me fist give some context: product sales companies promote their products, in catalogs, in a CMS-based promotional site, a webshop, the Point-of-sale system, etc.
This data has to be stored somewhere in the companies' systems.
Until a few years ago the question where to store it was easy. Via EDI or incoming files the product data would be imported into the ERP.
The ERP would be the single source of truth about article-number, product dimensions, prices, descriptions, etc.
In the mean time ourwebbased sales channel has multiplied the amount of attributes per product. Added promotional information, visual representations, etc. This is well beyond the capabilities of the average ERP. Try using the product description of an ERP-based product in your webshop for instance.... It probably shows an alldescriptive name in capitals that no customer will ever use in Google.
So point one to consider is: we have to store many attributes that a classical ERP was not meant to hold and maintain them.
The maintenance is more intensive, quite often bulk-actions. Many more products enter the systems when we start engaging in the popular longtail way of doing business.
Probably you will onboard articles in categories you have never before handled in your systems, or will never hold in stock at all.
Point two to consider: products online are not necessarily held in stock or in your ERP.
Maintaining this additional product volume and the attributes regarding promotions is important given the immediate visibility form your customeres and cost-intensive! It requires maintenance functions for translations, promotion rules and the commercial representation of your products. Again a domain the is not part of a typical ERP system.
Point 3 to consider: maintaining commercial product representation requires specific PIM-functionalities.
Given the grown demand on product information, companies raise the demand on the suppliers. Suppliers need to provide good quality pictures, solid product feature descriptions etc.
However, although this is a cost reduction possibility for the company, now the need rises to consume that stream of incoming data and process the pictures, dimension attributes etc.
And with the evolution of products coming available transparantly in the supply chain, the amount of potential suppliers grows, increasing the need to connect more suppliers. These suppliers all provide different data, varying in quality per attribute and per source.
New demand: manage a multitude of product sources.
Point 4 to consider: maintaining products from multiple sources with the ability to be selective using programmatic rules rather than doing manual labour is required, including storage and maintanance of images.
Then there is the topic of one-off products. Your purchaser buys this lot of "non-repetitively" sold products. One container of product that is never sold again.
Always an administrative challenge. Product pictures not available, no ERP-feed. However you probably want to promote the products too empty the one-off-stock. This has obviously always been handled through the ERP, however in this online era we need to additionally manage the visuals and promotional attributes.
So, now that we have the context: where does one capture the dara-feeds from suppliers and maintain product-markeing and promotional data?
Assuming you do not have a state-of-the-art ERP which can hold the full marketing cycle, for longtail and marketing-sara you will probably desire to deploy a Product Information Management application.
Popular state-of-the-art PIM packages are Heiler (www.Heiler.com) and hybris (www.hybris.com).
See the references at www.unic.com.
So, now that we have the context: where does one capture the dara-feeds from suppliers and maintain product-markeing and promotional data?
Assuming you do not have a state-of-the-art ERP which can hold the full marketing cycle, for longtail and marketing-sara you will probably desire to deploy a Product Information Management application.
Popular state-of-the-art PIM packages are Heiler (www.Heiler.com) and hybris (www.hybris.com).
See the references at www.unic.com.
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