A PIM project is often declared a success when the data is migrated and the system is live. That is a milestone, not the outcome. The real question is what is different for the teams who create, approve and publish product information, and whether products now reach every channel correctly the first time.
The launch problem behind the software request
Teams rarely ask for a PIM because they want new software. They ask because getting products ready to sell has become slow and unreliable. New ranges wait on missing information, the same details are entered in several places, and errors are found after products are already live.
If that launch problem is not written down at the start, it is easy to measure the project by what the software project delivers: records migrated, attributes mapped, integrations built. Those are necessary, but none of them tells you whether a new product now reaches the shelf faster or with fewer corrections.
What work should disappear
A useful way to judge a PIM is to list the work that should no longer exist once it is running. The specifics differ by business, but the pattern is usually similar.
A workflow example
As a clearly labelled example rather than a real case, consider how a new product might reach the website before and after a PIM. Before: a buyer receives a supplier spreadsheet, a merchandiser copies the relevant fields into the commerce platform, a copywriter adds descriptions in a separate document, and someone emails the marketplace team to update their listings. After: supplier data is imported once, gaps are flagged automatically, enrichment happens in one place, and each channel receives the approved record.
- Re-keying The same information typed into several systems by different people.
- Chasing Emails and messages asking whether a product is ready, and who still needs to add what.
- Late corrections Fixing errors after products are live, often channel by channel.
- Manual exports One-off spreadsheets built to send product data to a partner or marketplace.
If most of this work still exists after go-live, the system may be live while the process around it has not changed.
Which measures need a baseline
The impact of a PIM is hard to show if nobody recorded how things worked before it. A small number of measures, captured before go-live and tracked afterwards, says more than a long report on migration progress. We would not quote typical improvements here, because they depend entirely on where a team starts.
- Time to readiness How long a new product takes from first supplier data to being ready to publish.
- Completeness How many products meet the agreed attribute requirements for each channel.
- Publishing errors How often products are rejected, suppressed or corrected after publishing.
- Manual touchpoints How many hand-offs and manual steps a product passes through.
The baseline does not need to be precise to be useful. An honest estimate from the teams involved is enough to see whether the change is real.
Who owns the process after go-live
A PIM introduces shared data, and shared data needs clear owners. Without them, the system slowly fills with the same inconsistencies it was meant to remove. Agree who owns the attribute model, who approves changes to it, who is responsible for each stage of enrichment, and who checks publishing quality for each channel.
Those responsibilities should be written down before go-live, not discovered afterwards. The goal is a process the business can run and improve on its own, with the PIM as the place where that process happens.
Product information, enrichment and PIM support from Stell Media.
Commerce data
