Trade
PIM system or ERP: managing product information
Once you have many items or sell through a webshop, the question of whether you need a PIM system comes up on its own. PIM stands for product information management. This page explains what that is, how much of it belongs in an ERP and what item data Uniconta holds.
How it works
What managing product information means
Product information management is the central recording and upkeep of everything you know about an item. Think of the item number, the description, dimensions, colour, size, photographs, the EAN and the texts a customer sees. For an SME with a few dozen items that is a short list. For a wholesaler with thousands of items and several sales channels, item management is a discipline of its own.
There are really two kinds of product information. The first is the basis your books need: item number, description, unit, cost price, stock location, VAT code. You use it on every quote, order, purchase and invoice. The second is commercial content, meaning long descriptions, several images, attributes per category, translations and texts per sales channel. That is mostly needed by your webshop or your sales team.
While you have few items and one channel, both can live in the same source. When things get more complex, the question becomes where the truth sits. Does an image or attribute still fit in the item management of your ERP, or does it belong in a separate product information system? There is no single answer. It depends on how many items you have, how many channels you serve and how often the information changes.
What often goes wrong
What often goes wrong
Untidy product information costs time and customers, even in a small business.
The same data in three places
The item sits in the accounts, in the webshop and in a sales rep's spreadsheet. When something changes, it is updated in one place and forgotten in the others.
Webshop and books that disagree
The webshop shows a different description, price or EAN from the order you process later. That leads to returns and arguments.
Variants without structure
A shirt in four sizes and three colours is created as twelve separate items, each with its own number and description. That is hard to read and easy to get wrong.
Nobody owns the data
Purchasing, sales and marketing each change something, but nobody guards the quality. After a while nobody knows which version is right.
In Uniconta
What item data Uniconta holds
Let us be straightforward about what Uniconta is. Uniconta is an ERP; we do not describe it as a PIM system. It stores the item master data your administration needs. What is confirmed is item numbers and EAN numbers in the central item data, an image that can be attached to an item, and variants. Up to five variants per item are possible, for example size and colour. You can set standard variants, and each variant has its own EAN and its own cost price.
What we have not confirmed, and therefore do not claim, is item attributes, sales channels and a separate PIM module in Uniconta. If you need richer product content spread across several channels, such as long texts, translations or attributes that differ per channel, that is something we agree with you beforehand. We then work out together what stays in Uniconta and what belongs in a separate system, so you are not surprised later.
A practical rule of thumb. The data you need for orders, purchasing, stock and invoices stays in the ERP. What only serves to present items to customers can live outside the ERP, as long as the item number and EAN form the link. If a webshop is involved, we help you choose one and deliver the connection with Uniconta. Shaping or building the shop itself falls outside our work.
Think too about who maintains the data. An item that changes in the webshop must also be right in the books, and the other way round. Agree which side is the source for which field. Often the administration is the source for item number, EAN and cost price, and the presentation layer is the source for texts and images. That stops two people changing the same item in two places in different ways. Without such an agreement no system helps, however extensive it is.
Our package
Which package it belongs to
The item data in Uniconta belongs to the Uniconta ERP standard package from Operion, with a fixed scope and a fixed price. We set up proven software to a fixed standard. We do not develop custom work in Uniconta. What is in the scope is agreed with you beforehand, and the scope is fixed before the start. Transfer of your basic data is part of the package, while cleaning and multiple sources are agreed beforehand.
If you need a separate system for product information, or a connection to a webshop, that can be a project of its own with a scoping phase. How the data relates to inventory management and to subscriptions is covered on those pages. You will find more about the platform at Uniconta. If you work with a price list, it belongs to the same item data.
Read on
More about Uniconta
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Decide what belongs in your ERP
Tell us how many items and channels you have. Together we look at what fits in Uniconta and what has to sit outside it. The standard package comes at a fixed price.