Product information and attribute management for retail
Does your data add up? Are you keeping up?
Every step in a product's life cycle, from manufacture to consumption, requires data input on attributes—size, color, price, ingredients, images—adding up to 1,000 elements or more. Traditional product information required to drive purchasing is now a fraction of what is needed to support multiple sales channels, and a diverse and demanding customer base. Often entered manually, product information is vulnerable to transposition, duplication and typographical errors, costing retailers US$40 billion a year. The product information and attribute management solution for retail from IBM can help increase efficiency and reduce costly errors.
Accurate and actionable information is power
Every new system or change to an existing system that maintains product information is a golden opportunity to reap additional benefits from controlled data. The product information and attribute management solution aggregates product data gathered from multiple sources ranging from suppliers, product designers, marketers and merchants, to bar codes or radio frequency identification (RFID) tags—and manages all aspects of product information.
As a result, you gain a single view of product information, so you can manage item and location information with numerous classifications, merchandising, geographic and operational hierarchies. You can also segment data and processes by business responsibility (logistics, finance, pricing, marketing and supplier) and control user actions (view only, edit, approve) by role. This proven solution can manage millions of products across geographies, with hundreds of users, for thousands of stores to provide the intelligence you need to make sound business decisions.
Reduce error, boost performance
By establishing an integrated approach to product information and attribute management, the solution can help you:
- Provide customers with relevant and consistent information about product features, marketing messages and promotions across channels.
- Offer new products faster than competitors.
- Improve brand and shopper loyalty through more consistent service.
- Streamline information gathering processes across the enterprise.
- Track product purchase patterns to gain insight into customer buying behaviors.
- Reduce inaccuracies that result in lost sales, lower margins and decreased productivity.
Make data an asset instead of a liability
The product information and attribute management solution offers a comprehensive portfolio of technology that can be customized to create a solution that’s right for your business.
- Create a central repository with an expansive data model to manage product, supplier and location attributes.
- Build a flexible hierarchy model.
- Establish collaborative workflows by connecting users across systems and channels.
- Manage and govern product data enrichment from manufacturer to retailer to Web channel.
- Enable multi-source data capture for core merchandising and enterprise resource planning systems.
- Take advantage of SAP hierarchy accelerators.
- Exploit pre-defined integration capabilities with IBM's e-commerce and content management applications.
- Benefit from implementation flexibility—you can start with a single system, functional area or type of data, and expand according to your strategy and resources.