Effective Product Information Management is Fueled by Great Metadata

By Marc Consolazio and Brian Courtney, for the Salt Flats initiative, The Meta Life of Metadata

When it comes to the alphabet soup that surrounds metadata, DAM often steals the spotlight, and it’s understandable why – there are over 100 prominently featured DAMs available in the market.

https://www.g2.com/categories/digital-asset-management

Some are traditional DAMs, some are mergers between two or more different platforms (like DAMs with CMS capability or MAMs – high-powered DAMs more focused on integrating multimedia than anything else), but all of them focus in some large degree on assets. 

So when it comes to PIMs, what is the point, and why would you use one? Why not just use a DAM? Well first, you must understand what a PIM is.  

PIM systems are solely concerned with product information – it’s essentially a DAM without pictures. Its currency is words, and more specifically, descriptive metadata. There are some industries where an image is not the defining characteristic of the product, where 5 different tweaks to a product may result in 5 different items, but with nearly identical imagery. Think about industries like machine parts, or fabrics and textiles. Do 300 and 400 thread count sheets in the same color require distinct images? What about a 3/8-inch hex nut, versus a 3/4-inch hex nut? Despite their similarities, there will always be unique elements between products. That same hex nut will have different size threading, a different weight, will be compatible with different screws, and have a different item number, to name just a few of their distinguishing features. Rich metadata captured around these assets is vital to the correct classification and identification of these subtle, yet crucial distinctions between products. 

There is also a time in your product lifecycle when all you have is the idea and specifications. You may want to add a new color to your 300 and 400 thread count sheet line, but before you have a prototype, you won’t have any images, however, you will have the product data. 

How do you categorize all this data? Many businesses have copious spreadsheets in Excel or Google Sheets, and while they may be meticulously created, they are often still cumbersome. Oftentimes a company has one gatekeeper of the “sacred sheets” who fact checks all the metadata and keeps watch over it, but what happens when that person leaves the company? A PIM keeps all that product data categorized, organized, secure, accessible, and scalable. 

PIM systems also enable valuable integrations with other components of the tech stack. When PIM metadata is integrated with your other tools, via an API for example, changing a piece of metadata updates everything linked to that product. Imagine a food CPG, where one slightly different ingredient can change the entire Nutrition Facts label. In a world where nutritional information can mean the difference between life and death for those with allergies, making sure the product metadata is always completely accurate is critically important. 

Now that you understand what a PIM is and how it can be used, you can probably start to imagine how the metadata found in a PIM and metadata in a DAM have a lot of overlap. If you already have a DAM, deploying a PIM might be much easier than you might think. Metadata is the shared foundation between these systems and with a solid foundation you can build amazing things.