For those of you not familiar with PIM, let me apologize in advance for pollinating your mind with yet another acronym.  Product Information Management, or PIM, refers to the systems, strategies and processes for managing product data.  While the concepts around PIM are certainly nothing new, retailers are now addressing their PIM needs in the context of their multi-channel strategy.  Because of the nature of what PIM provides, many retailers are seeing it as a precursor or dependency in their broader eCommerce solution initiatives.  If you have read one of my previous posts, you know that analysts are predicting a huge eCommerce platform refresh over the next 1-3 years.  If that information is accurate, I submit that there will also be a large PIM solution focus as well.

We need to deconstruct PIM a bit to understand why retailers are finding it so critical to their multi-channel capabilities.  PIM, as a concept, seeks to extract item management from the application environment.  Go back in time to the era of the merchandising system/ERP boom.  Retailers were buying or building big merchandising applications and/or ERPs focused on providing 'foundation data' to run their enterprises.  These enterprises were almost always focused on the store and warehouse environment.  Every merchandising application has some form of an 'item master'.  This data store typically comes with a big list of fields and in some cases some basic hierarchies.  Retailers typically use some basic editor screens to manage and manipulate this data along with any automated data feeds that they have.  The data in the item master is the core of a retailer's foundation data. 

As application environments became more complex, retailers needed to disseminate this item data to many other systems and tools.  Worse yet, the functional needs of each system often varied greatly.  For example, a supply chain execution system, like a WMS, needs a vast array of handling rules and dimensions that merchandising applications are often blind to.  So the retailer had to decide to build these new fields into the merchandising application (and the ability to maintenance them) or build application-specific item attributes that sit in the application that needed them.  Multiply this scenario exponentially across application environments and functional areas and retailers ended up with a mess. 

The final nail in the coffin of the application-centric item data store was the emergence of multi-channel retailing.  The ability of retailers to syndicate item information in a channel-specific manner was very low with core merchandising applications.  Each channel may require different versions of item information.  For example, the Web may require rich product descriptions and images, while the logistics applications require dimensions and other physical data.  A shopping affiliate partner may require an XML feed, limited to certain fields that they support. 

A PIM solution promises to extract processes around the aggregation, maintenance and syndication of product information from legacy applications, like ERP and core merchandising products.  The vision here is a nimble architecture that will enable interaction with product information in a manner that is not dependent on a specific application environment.  The PIM can be a single source of truth for item data and a clean separation from other business rules.  From a multi-channel perspective, PIM allows retailers to be able to maintenance and syndicate product information to their sales channels in a much more agile fashion, tailored to the needs of the channel.

I do need to mention that there are a couple of views of PIM that are prevalent across the software industry.  Some view PIM as a software application.  In other words, PIM functionality in a 'PIM solution' will address the challenges of item management.  Others view PIM as a strategy, that is solved with tools and processes to address item management.  While both have some validity, it is important for a retailer to take a good look at internal discipline and processes to understand which direction is best for the organization.    

Given the promises of PIM, many retailers are looking to get their "house in order" with a PIM implementation either as first step toward a refresh of their eCommerce platform or as part of that refresh.