Managing data efficiently is becoming increasingly complex. Many businesses offer various products and services to customers and need multiple systems and databases to create and manage the data required. The resulting complexity and lack of transparency can, therefore, affect the success of the company and the satisfaction of teams and customers.

Fortunately, things don't have to be that way. Let's take a look at Product Information Management (PIM), how it works, and how it can help you manage product data more efficiently. We'll also explore how you can further optimize your workflows and become more productive by using a headless CMS for PIM.

What is product information management?

Product information management(PIM) describes the process of managing all the data required for marketing and selling products. It helps companies ensure that they can use and share high-quality data and content, both internally and on external channels. This data includes:

• product data, such as names and descriptions
• taxonomy, such as categories and variations
• digital media, such as images, videos, and PDFs
• specifications, such as sizes, ingredients, and materials
• and other data that help you manage, market, and sell products

PIM systems help you optimize the needed processes and unite all related functions in one place. You can manage product data, connect products, add media assets and assembly instructions, create catalogs, and much more.

How PIM supports your product management

If you offer a vast range of products, you sure feel the need to organize and distribute the corresponding data effectively and fast. But even with a smaller assortment, efficient management can be tedious. PIM systems help you and your team become more productive, to stay in control over product data, and to keep the processes involved transparent.

Let's look at some more benefits to see how a PIM system can help your business:

• consolidate all data in one database/place and avoid faulty duplicates in other databases
• improve time-to-market times
• create efficent workflows that help you get the most out of resources
• distribute tailor-made and rich product content to all your channels
• increase sales and customer loyalty through valuable content and data

Ultimately, the optimization of processes in your company increases the quality of your product data, sales channels, and customer service, which, in turn, increases the satisfaction and loyalty of your customers.

Leverage a headless CMS for PIM

As mentioned earlier, you can reduce errors and increase productivity by managing all your product data in one place. This also serves the goal of many companies to reduce the number of systems required for their company. But what about the other content related to your products that you cannot manage in PIM systems?

Typically, businesses use content management systems (CMS) to manage their website's content like blog posts, form data, and media files. Many also have dedicated systems for e-commerce. However, what if you also want to supply your mobile app or IoT devices with content? You need to use several different systems again, which can increase the susceptibility to errors and reduce your teams’ productivity.

More and more companies are using headless CMSs to address these problems. With these systems, you can create any type of content and distribute it to any channel using APIs. Read our blog post "What is a headless CMS, and how can it help you" to learn more.

Of course, due to its flexibility and scalability, you can also use a headless CMS for PIM. Having all of your product data and content in one place can improve your internal workflows, content quality, customer service, and customer satisfaction.

With ContentChef you can take full advantage of PIM with a headless CMS:

Create tailored product structures

Your products and other content types are all different, and some require fairly complex structured data, others less. With ContentChef, you can create tailor-made architectures for any kind of data you want to use, regardless of its complexity. You can either use our JSON-based schema language or the visual editor. This makes it easier for your teams to create and manage products and content because they only need to work with data fields that are required for certain types of content.

Leverage push & pull content distribution

With ContentChef, you have full control over your data and can determine when and where you want to send it. Thanks to our user-friendly publishing workflow, your teams always know what content is online and on which channels they are visible. Preview products and other content in staging mode and push them to live mode as soon as everything looks good. Your developers can quickly build and deploy content delivery APIs that they can use to pull content and populate your channel's UI.

Feed data to any distribution channel

Modern businesses often offer their product data on more than one channel. With ContentChef, you can distribute your content wherever you need it – be it on your website, e-commerce site, native app, or IoT device. Since you use a content delivery API to retrieve your custom structured data, you have full control over your channel's look and feel. Let your designers create tailor-made digital experiences for any channel and endpoint. Then, let developers build UIs with their favorite and proven front-end stack. As a result, design and development teams can fully enjoy their work and provide customers with intuitive user interfaces, they'll love.

Straightforward asset management

Naturally, you have a variety of assets that are needed for your products and other content types. Manage your images, videos, PDFs, and other documents in one place and organize them neatly inside folders. This way, your teams can quickly find the assets they need and connect them to your products. Additionally, ContentChef has some built-in image and video manipulation features that allow you to auto-resize and format digital content precisely as needed. By doing so, your product and content managers can optimize media resources without the help of designers, who then, in turn, can focus on their craft.

Get started with a headless CMS for PIM

If you need a system for PIM processes and content management, a headless CMS is a perfect choice. Save time and reduce complexity by uniting all your product data and other content in one place and distributing them to the appropriate channels.

As a headless CMS for PIM, ContentChef can help you reap the benefits of both worlds! Sign up for a 30-day trial and give our headless CMS a try.