Product Information Management

Product Information Management Systems

A Product Information Management System (PIM) is a database specialized on managing hierarchical product and component data like product families, groups and individual products and articles representing product variants. Nodes on every level can be assigned various information like technical data fields, product images but also commercial information like prices or number of articles in stock, drawn from external systems like ERP.

Data in a PIM can be used in various ways:

• Source of product validity master data used in a CMS
• Supply of product data to be inserted into manuals managed in a CMS
• Publication of data sheets (typically using internal publication engines for simple layouts)
• Publication of catalogs and other marketing information (often using Adobe® InDesign as a publication engine, allowing more complex and flexible layout)
• Serving a shop system as a back-end

Open Source Solutions

There are many commercial PIM solutions on the market, many of them for specialized purposes. Only the smaller part are fit for managing complex, hierarchical technical product data, many are rather focused on selling clothing and other items of low complexity in a shop. There are also a few Open Source systems, among them ​pimcore, is a powerful system with a broad choice of extensions and a large market share.

Commercial Solutions

Even though there are good arguments in favour of Open Source solutions, this does not mean that Open Source solutions are always the best choice. The selection of a PIM solution is a strategic decision for the following decade (at least), and should be made carefully, based on the current and future requirements. All systems on the market have different strengths and weaknesses, and therefore, there is no one size fits all solution. In some cases, an Open Source system is the best choice, in others, a commercial system fits the functional and budgetary needs best.

We offer to provide our expertise in product selection consultancy to find the optimal system for you. From the entire market of commercial and open systems, we choose the optimal solution for your applications.

What we can do for you

• PIM product selection consultancy.
• Concepts for new installations, migrations, interfaces and data models for PIM systems.
• Interface implementation.
• Together with a partner, we created a solution for publishing product data and technical documentation stored in ​pimcore to DITA, and then to the desired target formats with DITA-OT.