Brand manufacturers today know the importance of having the right product data organized and optimized at the right time to launch new products, new seller relationships, or new sales channels. These launches are becoming more frequent, meaning more work in organizing even more versions of product data.

Brands are past the stage where they can rely on manual spreadsheets. Product data has evolved faster than any system could keep up. Multiple spreadsheets from multiple departments, each with their unique taxonomy of product attributes and supporting assets, only creates more work for organizations.

The rising standard today is that of faster time to market with product data that's complete, accurate, and optimized to provide a superior customer experience. But that's a tall order. The requirements of that data management place a substantial burden on brands to keep their businesses running while spending hundreds of hours on product information management.

This problem has existed for a while, and the world’s answer was product information management (PIM) software, a solution built to pool product data together so all collaborators can work with one catalog file instead of many. Keeping one "single source of truth" protects organizations from human error and duplicating work—and it makes improving product data far easier.

The earliest solutions were what are now called legacy PIMs. As with anything antiquated or “legacy,” there were reasons why legacy PIMs are now viewed only in the rear view mirror. Those reasons are the legacy PIMs lessons that the market taught us the hard way. Keep reading to learn those lessons now.

The Evolution of PIM Software

The first PIMs were introduced in the early 2000s. This is when e-commerce was still relatively new, and a local software installed onto a brand employee’s PC was an appropriate answer to the growing data management needs. These "legacy PIMs" were used to pool hundreds (or thousands) of SKUs together. Brands thought it couldn't get much better than that.

As the market changed, brands' and manufacturers' data management needs changed with it. Local software installed on a PC was soon considered archaic, and then cloud and SaaS technology became the norm.

For many teams with employees spread out geographically (further away every year), Legacy PIMs were no longer an option at all. Brands were coming up with more products, too, and the number of SKUs was becoming more time-consuming to manage. Legacy PIMs couldn't load or link to product assets like images or video, either, which meant that managing all audio-visual assets continued to be a manual process.

Most of all, it was the growing need to segment "versions'' of product data for each seller or channel that rendered Legacy PIMs moot. If these PIMs could only be used for one "master version" of product data without easily managing and exporting data for other sellers’ requirements, then it wasn't much better than just another spreadsheet.

Legacy PIMs lessons fell fast, like dominoes. The antiquated software served their purpose. PIM solutions have now evolved and expanded to support new business demands and use cases. The lessons learned from Legacy PIMs directly informed the development of the PIMs of today—as well as the promise of PIMs tomorrow.

Lesson 1: Real-Time Data Updates

Even before the start of the pandemic, brand and manufacturer employees were spreading out. The pandemic accelerated this trend in a colossal way. From enabling remote offices and work-from-home to hiring people from around the world, brands now enjoy greater access to talent without restriction of geography, time zone or market.

Legacy PIMs would never have been able to support brands or manufacturers in this environment. But the market was listening, and legacy PIMs lessons were turned into initiatives for new solutions. Innovative PIMs were developed with this “modern team” in mind, moving the whole product catalog to the cloud where everyone who needs it can access the same catalog data in one place.

Cloud-based PIMs also allow for user-specific permissions. This protects data from accidental errors. Data versioning, the timestamps of edits, and total trackability are all built into certain PIMs to help brands act as the best stewards of their product data.

Lesson 2: New Types of Data

As Legacy PIMs phased out, another lesson learned was the absolute need for flexibility in how product catalogs are built. There couldn't be a set taxonomy of required product attributes, because new attributes are needed all the time.

Each seller or sales channel will have its own requirements, for starters. Companies like Legacy Home and Décor had their own headaches around multiple seller relationships published in this case study. Legacy Home also grew its product catalog by hundreds of new SKUs, and innovative products will require new catalog data attributes, too. Every product launch could be a potential nightmare in a data management system built of spreadsheets.

With all these balls in the air, the next generation brand manufacturer needs total control over how products are classified and broken down in catalog data to get to juggling.

The growing degree of collaboration makes this reality even more pressing. PIM solutions now need to support users from merchandising, marketing, creative, sales, manufacturing, call and service centers, legal, administrative roles and more. Those collaborators are both inside and outside of the organization, too.

Beyond simple product attributes, product data today includes more audio-visual rich assets. Siloing those assets in a labyrinth of folders only creates more work for today's teams. Instead, a PIM that links assets to the products they support is one of the greatest advantages of the newest PIM solutions.

Lesson 3: The Solution You Need

Speaking of PIM solutions, there's growing confusion today around the different product-data-related software types. There's PIM, PXM (product experience management), MDM (master data management), PDM (product data management), DAM (digital asset management) and more. Brands commonly invest in the wrong technologies.

Does your brand need static and dynamic list customizations for a complex catalog of multiple product families? Does your brand have so many product images that only a bulk image uploader linked to your product data will work? Have your needs top of mind when you start looking at solutions.

Just like the legacy PIMs quickly phased out because they couldn’t solve new business cases, the current PIM market has to be navigated based on each brand’s specific use case to make the best selection for both short-term and long-term strategy.

Both B2B and B2C brand manufacturers across multiple verticals and product categories benefit from the introduction of the right solution, and potentially complicate their lives even more with the wrong solution.

To secure the right product data product, establish how each solution impacts your existing and future business practices. Get input from the multiple departments who would collaborate in the tool. Then get a plan in place before implementation that positions each department and individual user to understand the benefits of the solution so that adoption and business acceptance don’t take unnecessary time.

Lesson 4: Software Updates

With the rate at which legacy PIMs once lagged behind its users’ new requirements (which, themselves, were the response to new seller and channel requirements), almost every PIM today agrees on one need: the power to roll out software updates.

The obvious benefit of using a PIM in the cloud is that teams dispersed around the world can access the same “single source of truth” product catalog. The unspoken benefit is how frequently cloud-based SaaS solutions are updated.

The increasingly modular nature of cloud-native PIMs is also keeping many solutions from becoming over-complicated from the user perspective.

For instance, imagine that one brand is selling direct-to-consumers on multiple e-commerce platforms, but another only has relationships with sellers who retail their products. Both businesses need a PIM, but separate modules for marketing optimizations and customer service product data support can keep added buttons and workflows out of the way for the brand that doesn’t need them.

PIMs and other SaaS are updated over and over to increase their efficiency, fix bugs, and introduce new features. These regular updates lower the cost of software updates for a firm over time.

The PIM Market: Introducing the Next-Gen PIM

The PIM market has evolved along with the brand manufacturers that use them. Today’s PIM solutions share some core competencies but then each specialize in different industries or modular advantages.

There are even unique ways some PIMs go about solving universal product data problems.

The next-gen PIM by Amber Engine is the most recent take on new demands—from the market, from brands and manufacturers, and from individual users who live in a mobile-first world. Some of those demands are:

There’s no time to wait months to implement a solution. A PIM is supposed to save you months of product data management work, so why replace that time with months of PIM implementation? The roll-out of the next-gen PIM is so fast and simple that brands get instant benefits with organization-wide onboarding shortly thereafter.
Unique permissions for whole departments and specific users is a “must” for multi-departmental collaboration. In other PIM solutions, anybody with access can accidentally delete, change or move product data. In the next-gen PIM, completely flexible permissions enable airtight stewardship over product catalog data while still engaging in greater collaboration than ever.
Today’s business models need multiple versions of product data organized without needless duplication and “siloing” of work. Built-in templates for specific channels, customizable static lists, and dynamic lists make organizing product data in all its versions easy and error-proof in the next-gen PIM.

Legacy PIMs lessons were hard learned for some brands. It was a great way to pool product data and manage it in one place. When the market requirements changed, however, any brand or manufacturer that tried to “get by” with a legacy PIM was eventually undermined by their dispersing teams, new types of product data, and a local software that went “stale” with zero improvements or updates.

The market has evolved to require a cloud-native, modular solution that meets today’s needs and can deftly evolve to the needs of tomorrow.

Check out the next-gen PIM in action for yourself.

4 Lessons Learned From Legacy PIMs