Product Master Data Management

The process of supporting data quality across the enterprise and value chain begins with efficiently onboarding error free data from manufacturers, brand owners and suppliers. Doing so enables retailers and distributors to speed time-to-market by eliminating sub-optimal data sets and spending less time on the onboarding process.

To facilitate this process, Stibo Systems’ Product MDM includes a variety of features to accelerate product data acquisition and sourcing.

These include onboarding using an integrated import manager as well as through Smartsheets, supplier Item Web UI, CNET data sourcing and GDSN subscriptions.

With such a wide variety of options, data can be ingested more quickly and efficiently, making it available and ready for effective use within business processes in order to drive revenue and enable delivery of superior results and outcomes.

To sustain a rigid product master data policy, it’s critical all data touch points are synchronized with the system of record. PMDM serves as the central repository for this data. However, it’s necessary to be able to deliver content to both downstream systems and external applications for data processing requirements. Users also need consistent responses to make informed decisions that affect business operations.

To deliver on this need, Stibo Systems is constantly adding to a growing list of inbound and outbound integrations to ensure data remains synchronized for

reliable access. The latest updates include support for MongoDB, Amazon SQS, SAP IDOC, Hybris, Ariba CIF and cXML. As well as outbound data integration using traditional ETL techniques.

Organizations implementing Product MDM with other applications will find this combination, along with our existing PMDM Integration Suite (Oracle AQ/JMS/IBM Websphere/REST/JSON), provides a wide variety of options to quickly realize desired business outcomes.

The latter is essential in creating a single source of truth – a golden record – that enables more predictive outcomes, increased productivity and consistent experiences across all touchpoints.

In addition to standard product attributes, classifications and references, PMDM offers a wide variety of additional modeling and governance features that support the delivery of trustworthy data, including rule-based product classification, supply chain packaging and hierarchy management, a data catalog connector, and prescriptive support for automotive parts and associated application management.

When it comes to managing product information, data quality is the overriding factor that defines the success of all desired outcomes. PMDM empowers customers to maintain and enrich content to achieve this level of quality in multiple ways, including an optimized role-based user experience that guides navigation, limits errors and improves efficiency and productivity.

Using AI to deliver and enrich content quality

Stibo Systems is also constantly adding new functionality to support and accelerate content quality and enrichment. This includes artificial intelligence and machine learning to automatically recognize image patterns, identify inconsistencies and flag duplicate assets to ensure compliance and deliver superior omnichannel experiences.

In addition to AI, PMDM now features an optional embedded analytics platform, empowering users across the organization to exploit a full range of descriptive, predictive, prescriptive and diagnostic analytics to drive better business outcomes.

The solution also includes a range of other features, such as a bulk data manager, data profiles and Acrolinx content optimization to ensure data is fit for market, audience, context and purpose.

Engage your audience – wherever they are

In addition to quality, making sure content is relevant to the audience is also critical. This is especially true distributing product data across global markets, where timely, accurate translations are a must. Localized content engages audiences, strengthens brand and improves conversion.

That said, the translation process can be difficult, expensive and time-consuming. PMDM empowers users to efficiently manage the localization of relevant content through seamless integration with leading translation providers, including Lionbridge and SDL. This allows improved visibility, accuracy, productivity and faster time-to-market for organizations bringing products to global audiences and markets.

Delivering superior experiences means storing, managing and updating a constantly growing volume and variety of digital content. These assets include a broad range of file types, sizes, formats and versions to support multiple markets. In an environment where “content is king,” the inevitable redundancy and inconsistency can be a problem.

To address this, Product MDM includes an array of image management features to improve the efficiency of managing, organizing and distributing content. Central to this is an integrated Digital Asset Management (DAM) system that enables the organization, storage and retrieval of unstructured content including images, audio, movies, animations and other media assets. It provides the improved consistency, discoverability and control that elevates DAM to drive a customer experience (CX) advantage.

Partnership with Tenovos

To complement our DAM solution, PMDM can be combined with Tenovos’ cloud-based Global Marketing Supply Chain™ (GMSC) platform that can be used for large marketing initiatives where content must transcend highly-complex distributed ecosystems.

In addition to digital asset management, PMDM includes a variety of added features to speed and simplify image and content management, including an Adobe Scene7 adapter, as well as for driving SEO and marketing efficiency, including:

Image meta-tagging – The power of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms are used to automatically classify and enrich assets with metadata gathered through the Google Cloud Vision API. This saves users considerable time manually tagging images to enable search, matching and linking.

Image de-duplication – Also enabled by AI/ML, stored duplicate images can be easily identified and eliminated to maintain library efficiency, speed image selection, improve system performance and reduce storage requirements.

Adopting the use of industry standards enables organizations to efficiently conduct business across borders, systems and markets, and to improve operational efficiency, open new markets and increase revenue.

Stibo Systems’ PMDM features built-in support for a broad range of industry standards, providing distributors and manufacturers a proven out-of-the-box approach to importing and exporting product data that conforms to leading industry formats. This ensures trading partners adhere to the same guidelines and drives a collective competitive edge.

With each new release, Stibo Systems provides updates and adds support for new and emerging standards, ensuring customers can continue to work within the latest parameters of a standard and continue to enter new markets and sectors.

Our current release also adds enhanced support for the AutoCare, TecDoc and NAPA standards to support the automotive sector, as well as updates to support the BMEcat, eCl@ss, ETIM and UNSPSC classification systems.

Organizations constantly struggle with sharing product data across multiple channels. This is compounded by having to support differing requirements and formats to satisfy the individual needs of suppliers, customers and value chain partners, while maintaining data consistency and quality.

PMDM includes an integrated cloud-based Product Data Syndication (PDS) solution that addresses this challenge, allowing data standards to be easily managed and updated, while supporting a superior customer experience (CX) and enabling accelerated revenue opportunities.

Drive collaboration through predefined channels

Stibo Systems’ PDS enables the exchange of product information between data providers (manufacturers and brands) and data receivers (retailers, distributors, marketplaces, CSPs/content service providers, GDSN data pools and other partners) using multiple predefined channels, reducing time spent managing requirements and improving speed-to-market.

Seamless integration with Product MDM ensures assets can be monitored and tracked, making syndication of product data easy, manageable and maintainable.

An agile solution to meet everyone’s needs

PDS empowers data providers using PMDM to acquire, manage and syndicate product information to data receivers with ease and confidence, enabling them to:

• Improve customer satisfaction
• Build trust and win new business with value chain partners
• Speed product onboarding and time-to-market
• Increase revenue and reduce operating costs

Tighter budgets, deadlines and the non-stop thirst for diverse content assets place increased pressure on already stressed publishing processes and resources. In order to support a true omnichannel experience and deliver assets to reach all audiences across all channels, marketing and publishing management teams need tools that speed and simplify the process of finding the right images, copy and pricing data for physical catalog generation.

Meeting these challenges and delivering true value to the business requires organizations to take a holistic approach that addresses the entire production process, from concept all the way to the delivery of approved published content.

PMDM includes a comprehensive Print Publisher solution built to empower creative teams to improve productivity and drive operational agility and efficiency. This includes integration with Adobe InDesign to merge product content with catalog templates, as well as full page Flatplanner capability allowing for the creation and visualization of complete catalog pages from design to print.

The ability to associate entity and product data to illustrate multidomain relationships is essential to creating an improved catalog experience that engages audiences with relevant content across traditional and digital channels, delivering a great experience regardless of where they interact with your brand.