How can you collaborate effectively with PIM ?

After messaging and project management, it's time for the collaborative product! The diversity and specialisation of jobs in a company multiplies the number of people involved in each task... Commercial borders have been abolished by the advent of e-commerce and companies have several offices spread across the world... Start-ups are shifting the lines by encouraging teleworking... The flow of information of all kinds (internal, commercial, monitoring, etc.) is becoming clogged... What is the point of all this?

Collaboration.

It allows :

• Make remote employees work together: multinationals, branches or simply teleworking
• Promote productivity and skills by creating small team work groups
• Guarantee the follow-up of tasks: whatever the business or the level of validation
• Centralise crucial information to share it better and contribute to the success of projects

Innovative tools have quickly emerged to integrate collaboration into business life. Here are the first two highlights:

1. Collaborative messaging: "Borderless communication for all

• The cure: Slack
• Treatment for: chronic emails and loss of information
• Dosage: creating project chains, bringing together small teams to facilitate productivity

2. Collaborative project management: "A shared vision of the tasks and stages around a finite objective in time".

• The remedy: Trello, Asana
• Treatment against: paper to-do lists swallowed up by coffee tasks, the opaque vision of teams on the project purpose of their tasks
• Dosage: grouping of projects by sprints and teams, definition and validation of projects by stages/tasks

The next step...?

3. Instilling collaboration in the daily business: "Orchestrating the daily achievements of the core business".

After making communication and project management more fluid, collaboration simplifies interaction in the daily core business.

Let's take the example of the teams dedicated to product information. Their job is to ensure that this information is available and up-to-date so that the customer can find it easily. These teams work together to achieve a common goal that is part of their core business. These are recurring tasks, which they have to carry out regularly and which require organisation to know who is involved at what time.

To avoid the multiplication of processes and to simplify communication on these specific tasks, it becomes necessary to bring together tasks and people within a dedicated space. The more this space provides simplified modes of interaction, the greater the speed of the teams.

On the subject of business information management, the PIM (Product Information Management) is the dedicated tool that meets the need for collaboration around business achievements.

PIM focus:

• For whom : All contributors of product data (Product, Marketing, SEO, Photographers, e-Commerce teams...)
• Why : To ensure the rapid and error-free completion of product sheets up to their distribution on all channels and internationally
• The remedy: a collaborative PIM solution
• Treatment against: errors and loss of information on product sheets, Time to Market too long, difficulty in opening new channels quickly

4. Working together within the PIM

What makes the difference in a collaborative PIM solution is its ability :

• to simplify the structuring of your products,
• to enable you to collaborate effectively to enhance them (content, media, translation) on all your sales channels.

Here is a typical example of PIMus operandi: 1 way - not contractual ;) - to collaborate on Quable PIM

1. The product entry and the EAN code are automatically transmitted to the PIM from the ERP, which generates dedicated product sheets. The collaboration begins!

• The Marketing or Product team receives a task and an alert "A new product is ready for enrichment".

2. The Marketing or Product team writes engaging product descriptions, validates them or suggests them to its management.

• If a suggestion is made, the management is notified and given a task, and then checks the content and sends it back for modification if necessary
• The marketing contributor then receives a "Please modify this field" task

3. The photo studio integrates the photographs corresponding to each product

• The marketing or product team receives an alert "A photograph has been added to the "beige trousers" file

4. The translation team or marketing (via an integrated translation plugin or by importing/exporting files) translates the product information directly into the PIM

• The marketing team is notified and then validates or requests a modification of the added multilingual content.

5. The SEO team optimises the product sheet titles for the e-commerce site and enriches the metadata

• The completion of this step alerts the E-commerce team "A product sheet has just been completed and needs to be checked".

6. The E-Commerce team fills in the fields dedicated to marketplaces or other digital channels with specific requirements.

5. Content is published and distributed automatically from each product sheet to all channels!

• The whole team is notified from the news feed "this product is now online! »

This PIMus operandi is also known as Business Workflow and the good news is that it is entirely customizable. Your organization, your processes, your products: your PIM.

To make the PIM a simple tool that facilitates the life of each businessIt is important that user rights are flexible. The input is then restricted to the fields that concern the user in question, which makes the work of each contributor more pleasant.

Quable PIM can, for example, be configured as follows:

• The SEO team can only see and modify the fields in the product data sheet
• The product team can only see and modify the marketing description of the product

News feed, tasks, notifications and alerts: a collaborative workspace dedicated to your products

Effective collaboration also means keeping all team members informed and sharing the progress of tasks. This is all the more necessary when the contributions of several stakeholders intersect, as is the case with a product information management solution.

At Quable, we have equipped our PIM with features that allow us to communicate on :

• Collective information thanks to the news feed to keep all or part of your team up to date: "Marketing team, this new range is ready: get to work! Sincerely, the product team".
• A specific request to a contributor through **suggestions **which trigger the sending of a task and a notification.

The tasks are then collected in the personal space of each person on the PIM and are classified by status: "new", "in progress" and "solved" to facilitate follow-up. Each task received or finalised can (if you wish) be followed by an email alert to ensure that the information is transmitted correctly.

No more doubts, the information is flowing with control!

Conclusion

Collaboration is the basis of business work, it is a capacity that makes all the difference in terms of agility, productivity and therefore responsiveness on the markets addressed. We see it more and more: jobs and tasks are articulated around tools (ERP, CRM, PIM...) that push collaboration to make teams more efficient in their common achievements. Let's also note that these tools interface with each other in order to weave a fully connected ecosystem. The end result? A fluidity of ways to work together to gain in operational quality. Today, collaboration no longer only facilitates communication or project management, but is now a key part of the business to pace daily tasks. Quable PIM responds to this need by placing agility and collaboration at the heart of its product information management solution. No matter how complex an organization is, Quable PIM is fully customizable and scalable. The ideal product enrichment process is just a few clicks away and the options for applying the desired level of collaboration are numerous.