Creating the right Cross Team Collaboration for Digital Shelf Success
The golden question: Who should own a PIM/PXM program? The annoying answer: “it depends”.
The reality is that PIM is often purchased as a technology from one part of an organisation and they look to solve a specific set of problems; an effective tool for the management of product content, better accuracy of product representation on the digital shelf, improved speed to market through improved channel distribution of product content, improved operational efficiencies through reduced manual effort.
Commonly, the tool is bought in isolation from the wider organization that will ultimately be beneficiaries or required to play a role in the digital shelf or product content wider program. This poses a risk to the long-term effectiveness and adoption of the tool.
However, technology alone cannot fix any such business challenges, the right people and process must carefully accompany it to aid its success and drive the right behaviors, adoption and measurement. The product content or digital shelf program should be a cross-functionally owned or managed program with associated roles and responsibilities in both the adoption of the technology and its measurable desired outcomes.
As a consultant and strategic advisor in this space, I often find organizations of all sizes get stuck on this “people and process" element. Widely due to the lack of education in the value of the “What” the technology brings, the “Why?” they have invested in such tech. Thus, the struggle of the individual initial owning team in fostering wider stakeholder involvement and continued investment becomes more and more apparent as dependencies on program success rely on other cross functional partners. The result of this challenge is then varied adoption and siloed disconnected ways of working.
To build out a program that will allow for scale of products, channels and growth of a digital business needs a collective alignment on the vision and ambition as it pertains to company-wide objectives, and all the way down to functional objectives and individual KPIs that in some capacity rely on quality, accurate, compliant, complete product records. By involving various stakeholders at all levels early in the process will ensure that the system is built effectively around business use cases.
When leading vendors work and integrate and set up a new system it is noted that companies who set aside time to work in small cross functional collaborative teams, often placing representatives from different departments together, work best for long term success as noted by Chris Kennedy, Principal Solutions Consultant, Salsify.
Sometimes brands find themselves further into your PIM/PXM journey and due to the frequency of changeover of personal, have lost various stakeholder attention, subject matter expertise and team adoption. An advisable starting point is to reevaluate the use cases PIM/PXM is serving and working backwards through the process, to identify the teams who are involved at each stage and the beneficiaries of the content can help you uncover the stakeholders who should have a stake in the game and play an active role in continual improvement of process and adoption.
Engaging cross functional teams in large global companies can seem like a near impossible task; where to begin? Who will be my champions? How high in the company do I go? Who has the power to allocate resourcing and set KPIs for individual users of content? The list goes on…
The value in doing so is well reported:
Forrester Research ("The Business Value of Product Information Management.") found that 73% of companies reported that PIM helped improve cross-departmental collaboration. This collaboration includes IT, marketing, and product teams working together more efficiently.
Understanding what the company considers “product content,” and what components are is “in and out” of scope will assist in identifying the various sources of components of content, the systems they come from, the teams who create the information or assets. Considering both what serves you internally as part of business operations and externally what serves your customers and what serves the end consumer. All of which in an ideal world should be reaching your PIM (from various above channels sources, such as ERPs, MDMs, PLMs, Spreadsheets, share points/drives, DAM etc) as your central source of truth for all departments. Through this exercise of defining, you can start to unpack the various components of what makes up a product record for digital shelf (or other use cases) and map back the sources and owners of that content. By its nature, selling a product on the digital shelf requires a lot of varied information. What you are trying to do is showcase the look, feel, and features of your product digitally, as if it was in the hands of your consumer and in front of them in a physical store.
Take a pack of biscuits, we aren’t just talking a photo of the packet. There is the ingredients, weights, dimensions, packaging materials, marketing copy, images, videos etc. Thinking about where this information is sources in your business it may likely involve Master data teams, marketing, brand, regions, supply chain, marketing creative agencies, product development, customer services ecommerce and sales, regulatory and legal.
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According to a Gartner companies that implement PIM systems report an average of 25-30% improvements in data accuracy and speed to market, which directly impacts the roles of product managers, marketing teams, and sales teams.
(Source: "Market Guide for Product Information Management Solutions.")
