Is Product Information Slowing Down Your Business?
Businesses in the digital marketplace nowadays are constantly seeking ways to to improve efficiency and accelerate growth. Yet, complications to meet goals can often lead to questioning team performance, increasing resources, or imposing new deadlines.
However, there may be an overlooked factor that affects scalability and performance: product information management and organization.
Think about your business: How many products do you currently have and how’s their information structured? Perhaps you have multiple spreadsheets, shared drives, or documents with different versions? Maybe you even rely on tools that weren’t built for scaling.
How much time does it take your team daily to verify this data and update it across different platforms or sales channels?
Each item has technical specifications, descriptions, digital assets, and pricing information. Marketing might maintain separate files from the sales team, while e-commerce managers struggle to reconcile multiple versions of the truth. Even a minor error in a spec sheet can trigger a cascade of confusion across departments.
All of this can affect the organization’s performance.
Your team might spend hours, day after day, locating the information they need, verifying its accuracy, while emailing back and forth with different departments. Time that could be better spent on innovation and scaling.
And while this might seem manageable at first, it adds up fast. Micro-delays compounds across your organization, transforming what should be smooth workflows into obstacle courses.
In fast-paced markets like e-commerce, this type of inefficiency could cost you competitive edge and speed to market.
The Ripple Effect
Drawbacks can impact different aspects of organizational performance. For example, they can lead to delayed product launches, as the team spends weeks gathering and validating information that should be readily available. It can also be reflected in missed market opportunities, as there’s a slow response to market changes and trends.
Adding new sales channels becomes a bottleneck, as there isn’t enough human resources to update information on a product-by-product basis. At the same time, performing tasks manually opens the door to information inconsistencies. Customers may complain and even return products due to incorrect information displayed on product pages.
All of this leads to a decline in customer service, and could damage the company’s reputation.
So, the problem might not directly depend on the team, but on the system they are working in.
For example, let’s consider the following scenario:
Your team is getting ready for a seasonal campaign launch. They need to update product descriptions of +250 items across all digital sales channels. This process might take weeks as they locate products, create new versions, obtain product management approval, discover inconsistencies, and repeat for each channel.
In consequence, a simple task turns into a bigger project that consumes multiple resources unnecessarily. Now multiply this process across numerous campaigns you need to launch every year. The time lost becomes significant
The Systematic Solution: Product Information Management
This issue can be solved by implementing a Product Information Management (PIM) system. But what is a PIM? It’s a tool that centralizes information on all products, including their descriptions, prices, specifications, photos, and videos, transforming the way teams work with product data.
This system implements a single source of truth, as all product information is stored in a single location. This automates the update process, allowing changes to automatically cascade to all channels and touchpoints.
It also structures approval workflows, establishing clear paths for reviewing and validating information, simplifying channel expansion and supporting media management.
Companies that implement PIM solutions typically see multiple improvements, like accelerated product onboarding by up to 40-60%, channel expansion time decreased by up to 75% and product return rates reduced due to accurate information.
Making the Shift
Making the transition from tradicional spreadsheets, documents or shared folders to a more structured product information management tool requires thoughtful planning, but it does deliver immediate benefits.
It’s important to analyze your business’s current state and identify pain points. Start by defining which processes are complicating your team’s workflow and creating bottlenecks. You can start small by building consistent structures, and creating standardized templates for different product categories.
Eventually, small improvements compound and build the column for a stronger operational workflow.
These tools create a system that supports future growth.
Industry solutions like Catsy PIM have helped organizations make this transition smoothly, with implementation approaches tailored to different organizational sizes and complexities.
Conclusion
By implementing a Product Information Management (PIM) system, you’ll organize all of your business product information, eliminating barriers that hindered the growth process. For companies facing these challenges, implementing a PIM is a great solution. This way, they’ll not only accelerate their growth and improve efficiency, but also improve their customers’ experience through consistent and accurate information. And perhaps most importantly, your talented team members can finally demonstrate their full potential.