Informatica Product Information Management(PIM)
Informatica PIM is a product-oriented software solution that allows organizations to centralize and enrich all of their product information to deliver the accurate product descriptions and images in a globally scalable multi-channel marketing environment.
PIM provides an isolated source of truth for product data. It makes it easy to enrich products, manage images, and ensure they look great on any platform including websites, marketplaces, mobile, print catalogs, and retail points of sale.
PIM is a subset of MDM that focuses on delivering high-quality and accurate product information and is most frequently used to support merchandising and marketing. As a business-led solution rather than an IT-led initiative, PIM generally represents a much simple and more price-effective implementation than a more ambitious and organization-wide MDM deployment.
Benefits of Informatica PIM:
PIM helps organizations:
•It Improves the product data quality and accuracy
•Improves overall catalog and product information management processes
•Eliminate the redundant work and boost collaboration
•Increases the operational productivity
•Decrease time-to-market
•Easily expand in to new markets and locales
•Maintain brand identity across multi-touch points
•Increase sales conversions
•Reduce returns
PIM allows the organizations to easily maintain and enrich all product information so it can be utilized across sales channels.
Informatica Master Data Management(MDM)
Informatica MDM is a set of processes and tools used to deliver the harmonized data to support smooth business operations across a variety of systems and applications. MDM enables organizations to collect, match, clean, aggregate, distribute consistent and accurate master data to operational and analytical systems.
MDM systems typically manage the data across multiple data domains including employee, customer, financial, location, and vendor information. MDM projects tend to be very broad in scope and require significant resources to implement and maintain. The use cases for an MDM system can also span the multiple business objectives and functional departments across an organization.
Benefits of Informatica MDM:
MDM helps organizations improve business operations by:
•It Decreases the complexity inherent in globalization and expansion
•Reducing data inconsistencies that can have the major impacts on business operations
•Allowing organizations to make edits to data in one area and ensure that those edits are reflected in all appropriate areas
•It Provides the cleaner data for analysis
•Supporting consistent data across multiple platforms and tools
•Helping meet compliance regulations
Differences between Informatica PIM and MDM:
| Infographic | Informatica PIM | Informatica MDM |
| concept | PIM streamlines the product Information supply chain from creation to sales across different users | MDM creates a 360 view across any kind of master data such as parties, places, things and connects the dots across them |
| Critical capabilities | Collaboration and workflows with more enrichment, Vendor portal, Print catalogs and E – Commerce integrations | Data Governance, Stewardship, Hierarchy Management, Analytics and Data Quality |
| Business outcomes | Faster time to market and it improves operational efficiency | Trustworthy data, Comply with regulations and Smart decision making |
MDM helps organizations to improve the business operations by removing data inconsistencies that can have serious business impacts. However, it is an enormous effort with inputs and impacts across the entire global organization.
Conclusion:
Both MDM and PIM solutions offer a similar set of capabilities and can be used to organize the critical product data to provide companies with an isolated source of data. This centralized source of truth provides a stronger basis for making major business decisions.
If your primary concern is about increasing sales, adding additional product SKUs, or entering new channels or markets, then you want a PIM. It’s a dedicated, business-centric marketing solution that provides a much faster deployment and ROI compared to an enterprise-wide MDM system. PIM tools also tend to have robust connectors to the E – Commerce, print, mobile and POS systems as these are the main consumers of accurate product data for marketing and sales. On the other hand, if your use case includes managing other data domains like customer, financial, or location data, or treats product information as simply another domain, and you have sufficient resources and time for deployment, MDM may be more appropriate for your requirements.