On the Sell-Side of an enterprise, PIM processes involve product, vendor and customer data. On the Buy-Side, the key entities are part/product, vendor, equipment, plant, functional location etc. Even though a PIM application is primarily concerned with managing product data, it has to keep references to other related master data. The source of the other master data might be an MDM system.

A good PIM system needs to provide an easy integration environment for the master data to move in and out of the PIM application. A Unified Data Model (UDM) intends to provide a core data model framework to achieve this. This Data Model is a logical representation and need not have a direct co-relation with the underlying database table structure.

What is your PIM Data Model?

Companies deciding to implement a PIM solution have a variety of choices confronting them. These choices include pure play PIM Software Vendors, extensions to legacy applications and custom developed solutions. This article covers the questions that a company needs to ask themselves and their vendors while making the decision.

1. Expertise
PIM would be one of the cornerstones of your SOA strategy.  You need PIM experts who can help you integrate the PIM solution into your overall architecture to derive maximum benefit.

2. Ability to Adapt To Your Business Model
Is the Vendor Solution based on a flexible and extensible Object and Data Model? Companies should look for a solution that is able to map their business model  with the flexibility to change to meet changing business requirements.

3. Proprietary Vs. Open
Could you extend the solution by yourself or are you tied-in to the vendor? Your needs will change over time – make sure you have the ability to customize and create a PIM solution  that meets your needs.

4. Understanding Your Data Sources
Data migration and integration constitute the biggest challenges in a PIM implementation. Size  and complexity of data and integration requirements are the key factors that might cause project delays. You should select a Vendor that has robust Data Migration and Integration Tools.

5. Speed Of Implementation
How quickly can you deploy the vendor solution? How easy is it to configure the solution? How easy is it to build custom enhancements? These factors could make a difference of weeks or months and significantly impact project ROI.

6. Willingness to Prove Value
Is the vendor ready for a quick pilot?

7. Risk Mitigation
Is the Vendor willing to work on a pricing model that will help you mitigate your risks and ensure ongoing positive ROI?

-Upen Varanasi

We hear more and more noise in the industry regarding the overlap between PIM and MDM solutions. I feel that the market is still maturing in both the areas. The MDM vision is still evolving but has a long way to go before enterprises can get full value out of any MDM solution in the marketplace today. The bigger question that comes to mind is: Is MDM a superset of PIM? My answer to that is an emphatic no!

MDM is concerned with creating repositories of master data for use across the enterprise. Business workflows and processes should be handled by other applications and not by the MDM system. Let me give a couple of examples:

1. In the retail industry, you have the scenario where you have one or more master catalogs but you could have multiple slave catalogs for each geography or customer segment. Sometimes you wish to use a different taxonomy for the different catalogs and also want to specify different marketing information. The product bundling and configuration could be completely different. So it is not just a case of different hierarchy management but you could have complex data reuse and customization scenarios built in. Now is this the domain of MDM or PIM? I would say PIM.

2. In the buy side of an oil & gas enterprise, you have to deal with master data regarding plants, equipments, bill-of-materials etc. The data aspect of managing this is not too complex. The complexity lies in managing the process that would lead to effectively and accurately capturing the master data. Are these processes to be coded in the MDM environment?

Our belief is that MDM systems need to maintain information needed to accurately identify the entity and to have cross-reference information to other entities. If you start going deeper than that, you will have a case where you end up building a monolithic architecture that handles data and processes regarding all the master entities. This would lead to a nightmare scenario of most enterprises as they would get locked in at both the data and application level logic layer to a single monolithic architecture.

More on this next week.
-Upen Varanasi

 Most enterprises looking to implement a Product Information Management(PIM) solution are questioning whether they need to implement a best-of-breed PIM solution or go for a more generic Master Data  Management(MDM) solution. There is a world of difference in going with either of the two choices. The fallacy that MDM is a superset of PIM is being propagated by some in the industry. PIM and MDM serve different business needs. An MDM solution enables the centralization of master data and associated processes. An PIM solution handles business processes such as multi-channel retailing and eProcurement Cataloging.  

-Upen Varanasi