How product data is processed in Pimics
Pimics can cover data flow from import (or we can call it Purchase) to export to sales or marketing channels.
This process is represented by 4 steps in Pimics.
Vendor Catalog and Import
If you purchase any products from suppliers or vendors and you receive product data from them, this step can help you a lot.
Vendor Catalog is a part of the system which is independent of your ERP processes. We can call it also import buffer. Vendor Catalog focuses on importing all data from different sources, makes the base cleanup, by selecting of data and activating (transferring) it to your master data.
Usually, here you can have the same item more times because it is imported from different vendors. And the main task is what you want to transfer to your master data and what is better to have there, to make some kind of merge.
The most common tasks in Vendor Catalog are:
- Import files like Excel, BMECat, DataNorm to Vendor Catalog
- Management of vendor items
- Select and activate items to master data
Vendor Catalog and imports are usually separate extensions. You can find them on AppSource or ask us for more details.
Product Data Management
The main goal of this is to build up Single Point of Truth (SPOT) with all product data. Pimics solution gives you the freedom to manage product item structured data, such as product features, values, and links of products, keywords or internal and standardized classifications. In the same way, you can create, edit, and delete unstructured types of information, such as texts or pictures. One way to simplify data management is to use classification templates.
Common tasks in this step are:
- Work with items or groups
- Define the structure and use it for the inheritance of data
- Define structured information like features
- Define unstructured information like texts
- Work with digital media like pictures or documents
- Using classification
- Translations
Quality Management
More than 60% of companies do not trust in their product data (Ventana Research, 2017). It means they think that the data is not well-defined and has some inconsistencies. This step is focused on this issue.
Here you can define rules which need to be passed before you show this data in your channels. These rules should help you to check that the products contain everything that you need to have, and you provide consistent user experience through different channels.
Publication
It does not matter if you have one or more channels, you should have under control what is presented where. In publications, you can set rules to select data from your master data module. This is important because channel can have different needs, for example, pictures for web (usually smaller jpeg with watermark) and for print (usually big tiff in print quality). Or it can be that you do not want to present everything on every channel. Usually, a web has all items, and price lists or brochures have a limited number of items.
Publications can be updated manually or in the background. Manually is used when you want to keep data in the format as it is exported (typical price list, brochures). On background is commonly used for e-shops or integrations with other online platforms. Anyway, you can find a history of what and when is synchronized.
Integration with channels is usually part of the implementation of Pimics. There are a couple of standard integrations which are other extensions. See AppSource or ask us for more information.