IT Best Practices for Financial Managers

Chapter 12. Investing in Product Information Management

Deborah Metzger

Overview

Implementing a product information management (PIM) solution is an important activity for any organization with a product master. As companies grow, so do the number of products and the underlying attributes, many of which are used to run upstream or downstream systems. Product data is used in part to track revenue, determine operating expense, assign capital expenditures, and summarize financial results. Therefore, it is of vital interest to financial executives. Product data is often presented externally to customers, suppliers, and distributors. Product data is exchanged via business-to-business (B2B) transactions. Product data may appear on customer-facing documents including invoices, purchase orders, and sales orders. As such, managing individual attributes and product number schemes, communicating internally and externally, and integrating new product data into an existing structure pose different and often costly challenges.

Implementation of a PIM system can provide a foundation and single location to standardize product data, enforce data governance, communicate with internal upstream and downstream systems, and simplify external communication with suppliers and customers. Integration of future product master data (e.g., via acquisition or other business event) into existing product-related data is often significantly less complex once a PIM system is in place.

This chapter will focus on catalysts ...