Challenges in Product Management Product management
Summary
Complex products and global integrations add additional challenges to a companies product information management process. In order to avoid delays and future issues, even small local projects to automate product information management need to think a bit globally and longer term.
This white paper provides the reader with an overview of the typical issues a company has to face when working to integrate and automate its product information, with the idea that understanding the problem is the first step in avoiding or solving it.
The problems discussed include:
- Data Synchronization and Update
- The “Minimum Common Data Structure” Issue
- Variation and Configuration
- Sales Process Integration
- Procurement Process Integration
- Globalization
- Standardization
- Operations
- Quality
Challenges in Product Management
IntroductionWhat Is Product Management?
If you work in procurement, sales or IT for a large or mid-sized company, it’s likely that:
- You’re struggling to coordinate your product information between catalogs, your web site, your intranet or your customers’ e-procurement portals, or
- You’re talking about implementing a product configurator or an improved online product catalog, or
- You’re trying to maintain and synchronize product data internally between multiple divisions, systems, and processes, or
- Sales is looking to you to provide the infrastructure and support to integrate product information into a customer’s e-procurement portal, or
- You’re wondering how you can streamline your procurement process, or how to get vendors to provide better information for your e-procurement system.
It’s not hard to see how these questions are related; each is a piece of the larger question of product information management.
Product information management is the process of controlling the quality and flow of product information from seller to buyer.
It’s a part of every business in every industry, and it’s become exponentially more complicated. Every sale requires a seller to provide product information - technical information, pricing information, product descriptions, graphics - and a buyer to use this information to make a choice. This information comes from multiple sources – engineering, marketing, sub-suppliers and product management and moves through multiple “channels” - print catalogs, web sites, procurement systems - to multiple buyers. As the number of each increases - sellers, channels, buyers - so do errors and costs.
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