The Need for Product Data Management

WHY PRODUCT DATA MANAGEMENT?

Companies around the world are beginning to see the value, as well as the strategic advantage of managing product data centrally, more accurately and more efficiently. Why? Because product information is essential to three major business functions:

• Sales & Marketing - for supporting transactional initiatives, whether B2B or B2C.
• Procurement & Sourcing - for rationalising the purchase of materials and supplies for an organisation.
• Non-Transactional Collaboration - the exchange of product information within and between organisations to support functions such as pricing, analysis, reporting, design, manufacturing, marketing and merchandising.

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With the evolution of e-business across all industries, sustainable business-to-business (B2B) transactions also require a closer collaboration between trading partners. One foundation of any electronic trading partnership is the ability to exchange product information seamlessly in a format that is mutually accepted by both buyer and supplier.

Traditionally, this process of catalogue 'synchronisation' has been a manual undertaking managed predominately by internal staff resources on both sides of the relationship. Numerous versions of product data, whether customer-specific or supplier-specific, are created to accommodate the terms and conditions of each trading relationship. As an organisation expands its customer and supplier communities, both the volume and diversity or product data increases. So too the need for resources to support this process.

The Hidden Costs of Poor Quality Data

Eventually, a once simple task of 'product data maintenance' grows into a complex data management problem. Further exacerbating this problem are the issues associated with duplicated data that is stored in disparate business systems, maintained across disjoint business processes by diverse groups of people across the enterprise - unmanaged and uncontrolled !

“Product data synchronisation is one of the prerequisites of successful e-business. In order to achieve the full benefits of electronic trading, both internal and external uses of product data need to be streamlined.”