Product Master Data Management

The process of supporting data quality across the enterprise and value chain begins with efficiently onboarding error free data and content 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 an improved search experience, with configurable faceted search, making it faster and easier to narrow results without knowing the underlying data model. As well as onboarding using an integrated import manager and through Smartsheets, supplier Item Web UI, CNET data sourcing and GDSN subscriptions.

Making it easier to ingest data ensures it’s available for effective use within business processes, and ready to drive revenue and 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. Product MDM 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.

Efficiently acquiring and managing product information is dependent on data modeling, roles, workflow routines, business rules and controls that guide and govern how data is used, managed and shared across the organization, as well as with external partners and customers. Stibo Systems’ Product MDM provides data stewards powerful mapping tools to associate products with multiple classification structures, domains, entities and assets to provide univocal terms of reference to support superior decision making and business processes.

Empowering users to implement and enforce policies from the start – one of many limitations of traditional product information management (PIM) solutions, which also often lack the ability to create golden records, or to match and link products – ensures stability and consistency across all touchpoints.

The latter is essential in creating a single source of truth that enables more predictive outcomes, increased productivity and consistent, differentiated and transparent data, customer and brand experiences.

In addition to standard attributes, classifications and references, Product MDM offers additional modeling and governance features that support the delivery of trustworthy data. These include 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 defines the success of all desired outcomes. Product MDM empowers customers to maintain and enrich content to achieve this level of quality in multiple ways ordinary PIM (product information management) solutions can’t. These include an optimized role-based UI that guides navigation, while limiting errors. As well as improved error handling with actionable error messages, which automatically flags required corrections and persistent error messages between user sessions.

Using AI to deliver and enrich content quality

To enable even greater productivity and efficiency, Product MDM uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to automatically recognize image patterns, identify inconsistencies, flag duplicate assets and to drive high-speed auto-classification which can automatically identify 85% of products based on attribute information.

Finally, to make sure data quality efforts are on track, Product MDM includes popular accuracy and completeness metrics out-of-the-box.

Embedded analytics to empower everyone

To extract even greater value from master data, Product MDM features an optional embedded analytics platform

(EAP), empowering users across the organization to exploit a full range of descriptive, predictive, prescriptive and diagnostic analytics to drive unique insights and to optimize the value of enterprise data assets.

In addition to EAP, Product MDM features fully-integrated support for Qlik, Tableau and Power BI, including easy access to Power BI dashboards for deeper drill-down and insight.

Engage your audience – wherever they are

Making sure content is relevant is also critical to audience engagement. This is especially true distributing product data across global markets, where timely, accurate translations are a must. Localized content also strengthens brand and improves conversion.

To make localization faster and more efficient, Product MDM includes 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, updating and protecting 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 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.

The system also enables users to protect asset ownership, integrity and copyrights – an increasingly important capability – by previewing watermarks before applying them to digital assets and content.

Take asset management further with Tenovos

To complement our DAM solution, Product MDM 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.

Among many features, this adds integrated workflows for photo shoots, including studios, photographers and models. This makes it ideal for RFA users to manage assets and content creation when onboarding new products, and for automating the DAM process from ideation to distribution.

In addition to DAM, Product MDM includes a variety of features to simplify image and content management, including an Adobe Scene7 adapter, as well as for driving SEO including:

Image meta-tagging – AI and machine learning automatically classify and enrich assets with metadata gathered through the Google Cloud Vision API. This saves time manually tagging images to enable search, matching and linking.

Image de-duplication – Using AI and machine learning, stored duplicate images are identified and eliminated to maintain library efficiency, speed image selection and 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’ Product MDM 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.

Product MDM 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 Product MDM 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.

Product MDM 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.