By Luna Markerink, Sales Consultant
When do you need PIM? Recognise these 5 signs.
More products, more suppliers, a new sales channel. Your organisation is growing. But is the way you process product data keeping up?
A PIM system becomes relevant when managing product information consistently involves too much manual work, too many errors or too much delay. You notice it in products waiting to go live, information that differs between channels and colleagues correcting the same data over and over.
The signs are often visible before anyone starts talking about new software. These five help you assess where you stand and what needs attention.
1. Your assortment grows. So does the manual work.
Adding a new brand should create room for growth. In practice, it first gives your team a pile of work.
Sorting through files. Converting columns. Linking images. Requesting missing specifications. With the next supplier, it starts all over again.
For a few products, that is still manageable. But if every expansion requires the same manual steps, your team's capacity determines how much assortment you can offer. Products are available, but not yet on sale.
PIM helps you manage and enrich product information in a structured way. The benefit grows when you also organise the incoming data: automatically converting supplier data to your data model, checking it and preparing it for processing.
The check: how much work would it take to connect a new supplier tomorrow? And how much of that work have you already done for other suppliers?
2. Every sales channel needs attention again.
Updating a product description in the webshop. Making the same change on a marketplace. Then checking whether the B2B portal is still correct.
When the same information is maintained in several places, every change needs attention again. Somewhere, an old image remains or an important specification is missing.
At the same time, product information does not have to be identical everywhere. A marketplace has different requirements from your own webshop. A business buyer sometimes needs different information from a consumer.
You therefore need a reliable product foundation, with room for differences by channel. In PIM, you manage shared information and determine which content, attributes and formats each channel receives.
That makes an additional sales channel easier to manage.
The check: how many places do you need to update when a single product attribute changes?
3. Your most important product data process lives in a colleague's head.
Someone knows exactly which file is correct. Which macro to run. Why you need to swap two columns for that one supplier.
That works, until that colleague goes on holiday.
Excel can work well for a manageable assortment. The vulnerability emerges when files, exceptions and personal knowledge together form a business-critical process. Then expansion becomes difficult and handing over work takes time.
Central product information helps. Clear agreements on ownership, processing and checks are just as important. Record which source takes priority, who can change information and when a product is ready for publishing.
A well-configured PIM makes those agreements actionable and provides visibility into changes.
The check: can a colleague take over the process without first needing an extensive explanation of files and exceptions?
4. You only discover missing information when a customer asks for it.
A customer asks about dimensions. A marketplace rejects an item. You discover that the material filter misses part of your assortment.
The information has been missing for some time. It just was not visible internally yet.
With a growing assortment, you cannot manually review every product page. You need clear quality requirements in advance: which data is mandatory, which values are allowed and what does each sales channel require?
In PIM, you can define these rules by product category and channel. Your team can then see which products need attention and what still needs to happen.
Check the content too. A completed field can still contain the wrong unit, an unusable value or conflicting information. The earlier you catch that, the less correction work it creates further down the line.
The check: do you know which products are ready for publishing, and can you see why the others are not ready yet?
5. Your products wait longer than your commercial planning allows.
A new collection has arrived. The campaign is planned. Product information is still moving between purchasing, marketing and e-commerce.
Nobody spends the entire week on a single product. Yet it takes weeks before it goes online.
Delays often occur between activities. Waiting for a file, a correction, missing imagery or approval. If those steps are scattered across inboxes and spreadsheets, it remains unclear where a product gets stuck.
Workflows help make tasks, responsibilities and progress visible. But also look at what happens before that workflow. Does someone have to manually prepare every supplier delivery first? Then the queue starts before the data reaches PIM.
The check: how much time passes between receiving supplier data and publishing? And how much of that time is spent processing, correcting or waiting?
Recognise the signs? First look at where things get stuck.
Several recurring signs are a good reason to review your product data process. Examine the whole journey: from supplier file to sales channel.
Is information scattered and central management missing? Then PIM can solve a lot. Does processing supplier files take most of the time? Then the incoming data needs attention too. Are products waiting for decisions? Then responsibilities and working agreements need to be clearer.
A central database does not remove those causes automatically.
That is why ConnectingTheDots starts at the source. With Import & Onboarding, supplier data is collected, structured and checked. From that foundation, product information can be managed, enriched and published.
Good product data starts before your PIM.
This approach helps you handle more products, suppliers and channels while keeping control of quality and your team's workload.
When do you not need PIM yet?
If your assortment is manageable, information rarely changes and your current way of working remains reliable, a webshop, ERP and a well-managed file may be sufficient for now.
Product count alone does not determine the choice. The number of suppliers, languages, channels and colleagues involved matters too. Focus on how much work it takes to keep information current, complete and usable.
Make that assessment concrete: how much time goes into recurring corrections? Which product launches are delayed? And what changes if your assortment grows further?
That helps you assess whether an investment fits the problems you want to solve.
Discover where your product data gets stuck.
Recognise the signs, but unsure where to start? Answer eight questions about your product data and discover which bottlenecks need attention first.
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