We talk to many brands who come to us needing solutions that support them in overcoming the challenges they face on a daily basis, such as unifying their product information, collaborating on product content creation, and giving their teams hands-on support. These challenges drain companies of resources, time, and money, so it is important that improvements are made to internal processes, in particular with their product information management.
This blog gives an overview into what a PIM is and why your brand needs a solution like it.
What is product Information?
A product is much more than a name, and different product groups have different needs. For example, when purchasing a pair of trousers, a customer would look for the size, material information, colourway or maybe the care instructions. Whereas if a person was looking to buy a smartphone they would want to know about the make, model, camera quality and processing power.
Throughout the development of a product, these vital pieces of information need to be attributed and stored together in one location. If they’re not, brands find themselves with silos of poorly structured product information, which leads to:
Information fragmented across the business
Data sources are inconsistent and hard to share
Images and data are not digitally linked
Duplicated effort and wasted time in hunting down information
Data quickly becomes out of sync
What is a PIM?
A Product Information Management system, or PIM for short, is essentially a way of being able to hold all your product data in one centralised location. This should be a system that allows you to enrich and manage all product information in a flexible and productive way and then have functionality to distribute it to an internal or external channel, like an ecommerce website, digital catalogue tool, ERP system or simply as an Excel file.
Why consider a PIM system?
If your brand has an extensive range of products (we are talking 1000+) with a complex product profile and no centralised place to hold related information, including marketing collateral, then a PIM system is the ideal solution for you. A PIM can help your company to:
Improve your compliance processes
Manage different sales channels
Track and maintain seasonal product ranges
Give all stakeholders the most up-to-date information when it’s needed
Support brand awareness and harmonise all outputs
Deliver a richer product experience
Speed up the go-to-market process
Save money!
aHub – not your average PIM!
aHub is a collaborative browser-based platform that does so much more than just store your product data and assets. It brings together all your product content with optimised images, video, 3D visualisation and marketing collateral, then makes it work hard across all channels. What sets aHub apart from the rest is a tool called aView that allows you easy access to your content. Search for your products by code or use an intuitive category system to find what you need, then use the powerful product comparison functionality to review the images, assets, and related information.
How We Work With You
We offer services to take away the pain of creating easily accessible, accurate content, giving you maximum benefit from aHub. We are fast, accurate and know how to make the best of your product information. We will:
Understand your product data however and wherever it is held
Configure aHub to match the shape of your data, structuring it to get the best results
Populate your data first time around to get you on-board swiftly
And it doesn’t stop there! Our Data Specialists are always on hand to offer guidance if you take on the management of your content within aHub, plus our extensive Knowledge Base will be available to you which contains lots of useful articles about every aspect of the software.
Alternatively, you can leave the ongoing data management in the safe hands of our specialists. We understand that your team members are busy people who don’t always have capacity to keep product content updated, and this can lead to gaps or mismatches in information and assets as time goes on.
Our Data Specialists can save your brand time and money by taking your revised data, images, and marketing collateral in whatever format you have available and uploading them into aHub for you. In choosing Hark you don’t just buy into the software you also buy into our team, because great software alone is not enough.