Key Advantages of Combining PIM and DAM Systems

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Key Advantages of Combining PIM and DAM Systems

Product information management (PIM) and digital asset management (DAM) are gaining more and more significance among companies in unlocking hidden product content value. While PIM creates a single location where all product data can be organized and stored with ease of access, DAM also creates a centralized hub for the creation, storage, and management of digital assets. In addition, PIM and DAM are known to serve a company’s bottom line, with DAM helping attract an audience to a  brand and driving better product selection or purchase decisions. But when these systems are combined, all the processes above can be managed under one roof through a single integrated solution.

As today’s technology landscape shifts to a broader paradigm of product experience (PX), combining rich text and media becomes the holy grail for effectively converting product marketing outcomes. Here, both PIM and DAM are designed to provide a single centralized hub for essential data and asset management, which can be used to publish across multiple channels such as eCommerce websites, mobile apps, native applications, IoT-led products, 3rd party websites, and more. That said, enterprises have realized that they are not just useful separately. Instead, they complement each other.

Here are a few key advantages of merging PIM and DAM: 

Complete Solution:

Combining PIM and DAM serves as a critical foundation for product management. By bringing together information from multiple sources, eliminating duplications, and enabling the delivery of personalized experiences with rich, structured, and contextualized product content, companies can be consistent at every touchpoint along the customer journey. Here, the ability to manage both product content and contextualization of products allows for the automated publication of trusted data with minimal human intervention. And to truly excel in today’s digital environment, businesses need reliable data promptly to deliver product experiences that match customer expectations. Combined integration of PIM and DAM is a complete solution for the same by delivering immediate synchronization of all media assets, saving time, and reducing workloads for content management and operations. 

Better Branding and Marketing:

Modern businesses are data-driven and rely on the accumulation and organization of data for customer acquisition and operational purposes. A combination of PIM and DAM systems can feed into this data-centric approach, serving an organization’s commercial needs. Moreover, integrating these solutions can keep all assets under one virtual roof, making brand communication easier and managing marketing assets a breeze. For instance, think of PIM and DAM as a central nervous system that helps perceive and respond to customer needs through signals (insights). Both these technologies work together to comprehend signals from each product experience to understand areas of improvement. Companies then react to these signals through relevant campaigns and a marketing communication mix tailored to the target audience’s preferences. 

Ideal for Constantly Evolving Product Lines:

Organizations looking to grow their product portfolio in numbers face complex, multi-layered distribution and logistics networks. These businesses can benefit from combining PIM and DAM to get a single version of truth for all product-related information and media assets. However, combining PIM and DAM into a single-source solution also amounts to specific functions that serve an organization’s product evolution in terms of features, functionalities, quality, and more. Here, PIM centralizes the faculty to update and store a wide range of product data, including SKUs, a listing of product ingredients or materials, product specifications like weight, size, and dimension, product descriptions for catalogs, and shipping requirements. Similarly, DAM can synchronize corresponding digital assets such as upgraded logos, videos, documents, images, and any marketing-related material.    

Unlimited Creativity:

Whether an organization wants to deliver a winning digital, customer, or omnichannel experience, infusing creativity into the overall marketing initiative is key. That said, it is crucial that enterprises employ smart, evocative videos, images, and other media assets along with compelling product descriptions and specifications to differentiate their product information and content. By finding key data and providing easy access to media, PIM and DAM combined saves marketing teams time to get creative with their engagements. Here, core functions of either system, such as consolidating and disseminating content from quantitative and qualitative aspects, data scoring based on predetermined company standards, fixing data discrepancies, completing data elements, standardizing the formats, and more, can help companies bridge the creative gaps in their marketing initiatives immediately.   

Constant Innovation:

PIM and DAM can help organizations distribute new product data and associated media assets in an organized manner across multiple sales channels. Integrating PIM and DAM makes it easier for product launch teams to constantly innovate while also managing or keeping tabs on time-to-market factors such as compliance, streamlined product information, timely product data entries, and more. Moreover, PIM-DAM with an API-driven architecture can help companies automate the gathering, creating, streamlining, and deploying of information related to new products instantly across various departments or teams, saving time for decision-making on aspects that need to be improved. It can also function as a sandbox for innovations yet to be launched without causing to fill up other day-to-day planning systems such as ERPs.

Associating PIM and DAM: A competitive advantage 

PIM is used to improve the overall data quality, consistency, and completeness, helping businesses get their hands on product data or information that is reliable, targeted, and well-structured. Companies with an existing PIM solution also deploy DAM to centralize and deploy all media assets within a unique and separate database by creating a single version of the truth. As opposed to deploying one of these systems for their functionalities in structuring product information or digital media assets, a single integrated solution with both PIM and DAM can help anchor the overall management of product data and digital assets and assist in delivering relevant and exceptional product experiences, helping gain a competitive advantage. In addition, by combining the capabilities of PIM and DAM systems, companies can follow the whole-product approach, which collectively focuses on product positioning and route to market, service partners, customer support, and resellers. 

Here’s what companies can get by integrating a single-sourced environment for PIM and DAM:

  • The solution will have a single source of product master data, high-end integration capabilities, or SaaS-based plug-and-play modules for minimizing implementation risks and infrastructure costs
  • Specialization services include discovery, configuration, end-to-end workflow management, customization services, and expert implementation.
  • The end-to-end implementation would include software support and training, upgrades, and custom feature development on a project basis. 
  • Data maintenance would be included for enterprise data users across every touchpoint from implementation to execution of campaign cycles.
  • Deployment of API-based connectors comprises easy lift-and-shift of data with minimal manual intervention and saves time for teams across all departments. 

In recognizing that PIM and DAM need to work closely together, organizations with complex and brand-driven offerings can use a single-source solution that serves both needs. The biggest challenge in creating a single integrated PIM and DAM environment lies in the different data sets each platform needs. Nonetheless, the right kind of PIM-DAM integration is built to meet this hybrid need. With fine-tuned assessment, adjustment, and planning of PIM and DAM, companies can surely seize new market opportunities and create new ones.


About Author:

Dietmar Rietsch is CEO of Pimcore. A serial entrepreneur with a strong sense of innovation, technology, and digital transformation. He is a passionate entrepreneur who has been designing and realizing exciting digital projects for more than 20 years.

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