Data Management
Often overlooked, Data Management is the process of ensuring you have good reliable data throughout your business. Having incorrect, out of date or duplicated data can have a serious impact to your profits, your customers and the efficient running of you company.
Open+ recently undertook a data management project for an e-commerce retailer which highlighted some of these errors and their associated impact to the business. As an example we have summarised them here..
Pricing errors
- Lost sales
- Uncompetitive pricing
- Profit erosion
- Poor customer experience with pricing changes post sale
- Customer services headache in contacting customers to explain error
Incorrect package dimensions and shipping weight
- Led to incorrect postage charge resulting in uncompetitive pricing and lost sales
- Logistics issues in warehousing, insufficient space was allocated for storing products
- Packing density issues on courier vans
Wrong digital assets - wrong image, video and/or data sheets
- Lost sales
- Incorrect purchases leading to customer service and returns issues
As you can see from the above examples, small errors in product data in this case had a huge impact to the business. It reduced profits, limited growth and the extra staff required to service sales issues distorted their business model. This last point impacted their future forecasting and their investment plans for growth.
However, Data Management is not just about correcting errors. It is about building efficient processes within the company to manage data effectively and with minimal effort. These efficiencies in managing content and data streamline business processes throughout the company delivering flexibility.
Efficient use of tools and processes minimise the risk of data errors occurring in the first place and well thought out workflow and approval procedures deliver constant checking and monitoring. Lastly, tracking and reporting ensure visibility, providing end to end data management throughout the business.
Open+ breaks data management into three categories...
Master Data Management
This is an architectural discipline that has a central depository for all core data within the business. All applications no longer use their own silo of data. Instead they now only use data from the central Master Data depository.
Master data management dramatically reduces the risk of duplicating data, conflicts of data between applications and multiple data management streams.
Product Information Management, PIM
Companies like manufacturers, retailers, distributors etc have the particular need to manage products and their associated attributes like price, colour, safety data etc. Products tend to be more complex to manage than most content and therefore require their own specialised solutions, PIMS. A single product, for example a car, will have many different variations depending on external colour, engine, interior choice etc. Also, if it is sold in various countries it will require safety legislation to be captured and attached to the correct product for each country.
So not only do products have many different variations, they also typically have several digital assets associated to them. Items like images, instruction videos, data sheets, instruction manuals, safety sheets etc. Each asset has to be managed in its own right but also associated with the correct products. Products also often have accessories, attachments or spare parts associated with them. Again, these are products in their own right, but they also have a relationship to other product/s that have to be maintained and managed.
All of these functions would be centrally managed by a PIM and again you would expect it to be able to map to internal business workflows and processes. Lastly, tracking and reporting are essential to the smooth implementation and running of a PIM.
Content Management
Content management is the practice of collecting, maintaining and distribution of content throughout the business. Content Management Systems are used in various parts of a business...
Web Content Management
Content for Portals, Intranets, or Company Websites
E-commerce Content Management
Content for e-commerce site creation and management including product content from a PIM
Enterprise Content Management
Finance, HR, and Departmental content management and collaboration
Open+ tends to use the CMS, PIM and Master Data Management capabilities within OfBiz and Opentaps for the majority of our small to medium implementations. For larger retail implementations we have built our own PIM module that fully integrates with OfBiz, Opentaps and other third party ERP solutions.
For larger or speciliased Enterprise Content Management requirements, Open+ use Alfresco's opensource CMS solutions. You can read more about both of these solutions in our Partner and Download sections.
