Experience report: Working without a PIM – a real nightmare

Now an entrepreneur, Mathilde Petit has worked her way up through two of the world’s largest cosmetics and luxury groups as a Trade Marketing Project Manager. Her testimonial focuses on this day-to-day work, which is dictated by the product lifecycle.

When you work in operational marketing, you have to constantly juggle product data, sales figures, market analyses and consumer insights to ensure that the products we put on sale meet our customers’ expectations. So much data is scattered across various Excel and PowerPoint files and is rarely analysed in depth. It has to be said that it’s rare to find someone willing to tackle this mountain of information.

In this article, I’ll take you through my day-to-day life as a Trade Marketing Project Manager, and I’m sure some of you will recognise yourselves in my experiences.

Managing a product catalogue

The first challenge for a brand is to build a product range that perfectly meets market expectations. You have to strike the right balance between standardising ranges for different physical and online retail outlets and maintaining the flexibility to adapt quickly to changing customer needs.

When you reach a catalogue of 800 product lines, you need to be organised and pragmatic, especially if you’re still working ‘the old-fashioned way’ with our two inseparable tools, Access and Excel. These two tools certainly have their merits and work well together, even if they will never match the efficiency and ease of use of a PIM.

In a year and a half, I managed to become an expert in queries, pivot tables and macros because, in my case, managing 15 retail outlets and 3 e-retailers meant dealing with 18 different product ranges! A real nightmare that required a huge amount of time and attention to detail if you wanted to avoid making a mistake.

If I wanted to remove a product or add new ones, I had to:

• check that everything fitted within the merchandising plans for each of the outlets,
• use an Excel purchase order to ask the supply team for available stock, reserve it and schedule its delivery, or stop shipments,
• check with our e-retailers’ teams to see if their product range allowed for it,
• amend the 18 product ranges accordingly.

I’ll leave you to imagine how many times errors crept into product listings or prices due to a bug or a miscommunication.

Launching new ranges and forecasts

What I enjoyed most was launching new products and the thought process involved in selecting the right SKUs from all the possibilities. Driving change is a major challenge that requires a great deal of attention and a step back to analyse our market data, but if done well, success is guaranteed!

Unfortunately for me, the product benchmarking and testing phases were followed by a lengthy process of data entry and sending emails to update the product catalogue and refresh the various details and images it contained. Not to mention the ‘forecasts’ or orders needed to reserve stock for the first three months of the launch. These forecasts were also entered manually, using software shared across all divisions but completely disconnected from our product catalogues or sales reports.

Analysing sales

A significant portion of my time was spent analysing the performance of our retail outlets and websites in order to track our sales accurately and promptly. This key task in business analysis was a real nightmare to carry out.

I would receive the weekly till reports from each of our 15 retail outlets and our three e-retailers by email on Thursdays. For our retail outlets, I had to convert our distributor’s product codes into our brand’s SKUs, which immediately brought to light numerous errors! Between the inconsistencies and the old product codes still being distributed, I had a huge initial task of data cleansing to carry out.

The icing on the cake? The reports didn’t cover the same time periods – from Saturday to Saturday for the shops and from Sunday to Sunday for e-commerce… A second consolidation stage was needed to bring everything into line with the same timeframe. From there, I simplified and edited each of the Excel files so that the columns being analysed matched the format I’d programmed in Access.

After 18 copy-and-paste operations, I ran my query to display a pivot table in Excel. I could finally analyse overall and in-store sales for each segment, range, category and product! This table had to be meticulously cross-checked against each store’s current product range to ensure that old products were no longer being sold.

Once those three hours of work were over, I could finally populate my KPI tables and produce an overall performance report, as well as reports for each counter, complete with tailored marketing action plans.

Now that I think back on it, this mammoth task posed a real business risk for the brand. None of our data was interconnected, and a simple change in one of the documents triggered a cascade of consequences…For example, this lack of overall visibility caused issues with the relevance of our product restocking, as it was poorly aligned with the outlet’s operational performance. This was a problem that directly impacted the day-to-day work of the supply-chain teams.

Conclusion

All these processes I’ve described were highly restrictive and prevented us from being responsive and, above all, from growing our brand’s business. When managing a brand in retail or online, we are dependent on the relevance of our product range and the products we put on sale.

It is now essential to have connected and agile tools such as a PIM or a DAM! These tools will streamline data sharing between different departments and, above all, make it possible to easily modify and communicate information without missing a single detail. All these worries and risks will be lifted from your teams’ shoulders, allowing them to focus on value-adding tasks!