The letters PIM in this context stand for Product Information Manager or Product Information Management (system). A PIM provides a single place to gather, manage, and enhance or update your product information. It allows you to do many different things easily and rapidly, such as creating a product catalog and getting it to your partners and other commercial stakeholders quickly and conveniently.
According to Wikipedia, with a PIM you can manage the information you need to market and sell goods and services through distribution channels. PIM users utilize a central set of product data to share and receive data with other websites, PLM (product life cycle management) systems, ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems, and print catalogs,. Users can also deliver electronic data feeds to stakeholders such as trading partners.
Reagarind PIM systems, Wikipedia writes:
“PIM systems generally need to support multiple geographic locations, multi-lingual data, and maintenance and modification of product information within a centralized catalog.”
“Information kept by a business can be scattered throughout departments and held by employees or systems, instead of being available centrally; data may be saved in various formats, or only be available in hard copy form.”
Put simply, companies use PIM to keep stakeholders, partners, and customers informed.
Consolidating all product data
A PIM system consolidates all data related to a company’s products or services onto one single platform.
Your PIM platform runs alongside a database with an application server, which forms a foundation upon which you can create and build purchasing and sales business processes.
Since the advent of the Internet, everything is automatically managed via an online administration interface.
PIM benefits
Product Information Management systems offer users complete control of their catalogs, no matter how extensive they are. The information below has been taken from Sales Layer, which has a new generation Product Information Manager:
Organize
The system makes it easy to continuously update and enrich your product content. Users save time and do not have to keep doing repetitive tasks.
Analyze
With a PIM, you can make sure that everything you sell is not simply good but perfect. Many PIM systems determine the level of completeness of a company’s product content.
Managers can track the performance of each member of their team.
According to Sales Layer, you can:
“Make sure that you always send the right PIM data to every sales channel. Keep your data up to date in websites, apps and marketplaces.”
Connect
With a good PIM system, you can improve awareness of your goods or services wherever you want. There are literally no limits. Users can connect their content to any app, marketplace, or platform.
You might want to share more with some customers or partners than others. You can decide how much access different people and organizations have to your data.
The market for PIM systems
PIM system are particularly popular with retailers, manufacturers, and sellers of consumer goods. Consumer goods are products that we buy for our own personal consumption; we do not use them to make other things that we then sell.
If your business has a wide range of products with frequently changing features, PIM is for you. It is also ideal for most online businesses where customers order electronically.
Video – the PIM Sales Layer
This video contains an overview of the PIM Sales Layer.