Think of Data is a valuable ASSET
You should always aim for achieving an excellent ‘trusted data standard’ and begin to look at data as being a ‘valuable asset’, which needs to be continually managed and refined.
To do this successfully you will also need a ‘product information management system’ (e-Pim) which will help you to centralise all of your product information and allow you to have full control over the distribution of your ‘valuable product data’ – and to all of your marketing channels. Every single bit of product information across your whole business should be valued and treated with respect.
You may be uncertain about what to do first…or even how to start?
Getting the basis of product data correct and as accurate as possible is the starting point. Here are a few handy steps from NG15 for getting your data into shape:
Step 1
Collect all of your product data. This will come from a variety of sources across your business such as your ERP system, marketing systems and other places. You will need to ask other data holders in your business to collaborate and help with:
- Gathering all product information
- Collecting attributes and technical data
- Locating asset data such as images and diagrams
Step 2
This is the ‘sorting process’ and involves getting the raw data into e-Pim so you can perform:
- Categorisation
- Grouping
- Validation
Step 3
The next step is all about consistency and transforming all of your product data in order:
- Normalisation
- Descriptions
- Product names
Step 4
You need to look for the data that is missing. We call this gap-analysis:
- Find all missing data
- Find all missing product images
Step 5
Enrichment – or filling in the missing gaps:
- Standardise, match and enrich your data
Step 6
Maintenance – The last step is to ensure that you can trust your data.
This means giving users the ability to track and understand data composition and continuously monitor data quality.
Make sure your business can trust the data.
If you trust it…then you can provide a better customer experience.
Once your data is in the PIM such as e-Pim, you have a wide range of powerful options including, data validation, editing, localisation and export. This provides you with the tools required to quickly expand into new channels and locales, allowing you to significantly speeds up the time-to-market.
