Creating the 360-Degree view of Product

I often have Gartner clients asking me questions about the differences between MDM, PIM and DAM. Retailers and brand manufactures seek to understand what business challenges each of these solutions solve. However, this gets much more interesting when the discussion progresses on to how these solutions can work together, and what can be achieved.

The scope of MDM, PIM and DAM

• MDM of product master data solutions help manage structured product data for enterprise operational and analytical use cases
• PIM solutions help extend structured product data through the addition of rich product content for sales and marketing use cases
• DAM solutions help users create and manage digital multimedia files for enterprise, sales and marketing use cases

Creating the 360-degree view of product data

The 360-degree view of customer data is well know. However, the 360-degree view of product data is often overlooked. Both can deliver benefits to customer experience programs through improved satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy.

A 360-degree view of product data begins by combining MDM, PIM and DAM to create a single view of the product. This can further be extending to incorporate additional data types such as transactional data.

Some packaged solution vendors provide the option to licences one or more of the solutions required for a 360-degree view of product.  Or, they may offer he option to license their partner’s best-of-breed solutions where the integration has already been taken care of.