THE REVENUE DILEMMA PIM OR ERP?

“The search bar is often your first-contact virtual salesperson. When a buyer enters your site, it’s like meeting a new customer, you want to make a good first impression,” Rob Neumann, NETFORMIC 

The first question to ask when considering PIM middleware revolves around catalog complexity which can be a high number of SKUs, product variants, international sales & distribution channels, high-volume enterprise customers, or rapid product turnover. A poorly designed sell-side product taxonomy often results in frustrating customer experiences, null search results, high abandonment metrics, and limited scalability.

 

Optimal Sell-Side Taxonomy

Although next-generation ERP e-commerce platforms are designed for omni-channel digital commerce, they don’t have the functionality to efficiently optimize complex and/or high-SKU product catalogs for effective sell-side sales & merchandising.

“If I were to advise how to do it (sell-side taxonomy) right (scalability, flexibility); let’s think about the structure, hierarchy, and how you want to relate objects (attributes),” advises Rob Neumann CDO CSS Commerce, “doing that much upfront work on long-term enhancements has tremendous benefit. Setting up your hierarchy and master data structure (in a PIM) will lead to a lot of success.”
 

BOMs, Assemblies, & OEM Parts

Although ERPs/MRPs have the hierarchal capability for BOMs & assemblies, that level of granularity cannot be loaded onto storefront e-commerce platforms without making the site unusable.

A PIM is an intermediate solution for storing, managing, & optimizing sell-side product content for effective site search & merchandising. The buyer’s search query determines category & product relevancy and pushes those results into the storefront for selection. As a result, the storefront doesn’t become overburdened with non-relevancy that often leads to website performance abandonment.  

An OEM equipment & parts dealership can create & optimize BOMs & assemblies inside a PIM and then feed finished products & individual components (down to the nuts & bolts) as they are received to pre-configured digital channels automatically.

For example, “we have a new client that sends a data packet based on a buyer request.” (Buyer) goes in and enters a BOM, a pre-filtered product catalog gets assembled in PIM, and automatically sent to the buyer.” Rob Neumann, NETFORMIC
 

BOMs, Assemblies, & OEM Parts

Direct ERP integration to your e-commerce platform makes it extremely difficult to upgrade systems in the future. It typically results in shutting your e-commerce website down & redeploying which can frustrate customers trying to fill their orders.   

PIM middleware allows you to consolidate & optimize your product information once & then feed relevant data back-and-forth to legacy systems & new software solutions through low-tech API integration.
 

The Verdict

It’s not ERP or PIM for those with complex high-SKU product catalogs, it’s ERP and PIM. They each have their specialty and complement each other. A PIM synergizes back- & front-end systems by acting as an intermediary solution that future-proofs your product catalog against systems upgrades & technological advances.