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, Product MDM includes a variety of innovative features to accelerate product data acquisition and sourcing.

This is especially important working with increasingly large volumes of products. Options include an integrated import manager that enables enhanced onboarding through Smartsheets, supplier Item Web UI and GDSN subscriptions.

Making it easier to ingest data ensures it’s available for effective use within business processes, 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 include tools to assign and manage unique global identifiers to attributes across enterprise systems, providing strong support for building and managing your Digital Business Hub. As well as support for MongoDB, Amazon SQS, SAP Material Master Connector, Hybris, Ariba CIF and cXML, along with 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 entire business ecosystem. 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 managing product information, data quality defines the success of all outcomes. Product MDM empowers customers to maintain and enrich content to achieve this level of quality in ways ordinary PIM (product information management) can’t. These include improved error handling which automatically flags required corrections and persistent error messages between user sessions, popular accuracy and completeness metrics, and a configurable faceted search that makes it faster and easier to narrow results.

Using AI to deliver and enrich content quality

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

Embedded analytics to empower everyone

To extract even greater value from 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.

Product MDM also supports Qlik and Tableau, along with easy access to Power BI dashboards for deeper drill-down and insight.

Engage audiences everywhere

For companies working across global markets, the ability to efficiently provide localized information and content is critical. In addition to seamless support for leading translation services including SDL and Lionbridge, users can now connect to the 3rd party provider of their choice using the asynchronous framework in our extension API.

This combination of options gives companies bringing products to global audiences superior flexibility and agility, by enabling the use of new or existing workflows. As well as a more open platform to support their overall digital transformation journey.

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.

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, 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.

Stibo Systems consistently updates and adds support for emerging standards, ensuring customers can continue to work within the latest parameters and easily enter new markets and sectors.

Our current release adds performance optimization for GDSN participation, for onboarding/publishing GS1 formatted data, along with ongoing enhanced support for the AutoCare, TecDoc and NAPA standards for the automotive sector, as well as updates to support the BMEcat, eCl@ss, ETIM and UNSPSC classification systems.

Businesses often struggle sharing product data across multiple channels. This is compounded by having to support differing requirements 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 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 and optimized workflows ensure assets can be tracked. Users can easily distinguish and

monitor status of channels in groups (e.g., 1WorldSync) vs. standalones (such as Amazon). All of which makes the syndication of product data and content easier and more manageable than ever.

An agile solution to meet everyone’s needs

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

• Improve customer satisfaction
• Build trust 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. To support a true omnichannel experience and deliver assets to reach all audiences across all channels, marketing and publishing teams need tools that make it faster and easier to find 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's comprehensive Print Publisher solution empowers creative teams to improve productivity and drive operational agility and efficiency. This includes integration with Adobe InDesign CC 2020 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.