Product Information Management: Your Digital Link to the Cloud

Item Mastering for the Value Chain

How will your company maintain unified and accurate item records?

Item master data typically comes from a variety of disparate sources throughout the enterprise. Given the amount of variability that can exist at item creation and throughout its lifecycle, there is a high probability that incorrect item records will go unnoticed, causing latency, inaccurate product information, and poor customer experience.

A simplified item master provides a unified and governed environment for all key stakeholders, both internal and external, to enter item data. The first step in enabling this process is implementing a single-source-of-truth solution where data can be ingested through a variety of methods. This is where an open-architecture cloud- or web-based portal is ideal, because it enables data to be uploaded from anywhere, at any time, from any device, and from any process. A single repository ensures your product data is consistent with built-in controls and business-rule validations so you can govern item uploads and monitor corrections in real time. This means you have precise product information when you launch a new product into multiple sales channels.

The value of a cloud-based PIM approach is its ability to standardize and integrate data across solutions, applications, and databases.
—Aberdeen Group
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Best-Practice Guide for a Unified Item Master

Dispersed Item Records to Unified Master
Product Release to Supply Chain Readiness
New Product to Omnichannel Commerce

Review item records

Review item definitions from new entities arising from mergers and acquisitions, new facilities, new partners, etc.

Standardize item definition

Determine common data attributes and definition. Facilitate stakeholder collaboration using secure social interaction.

Establish data governance

Define business rules including validation and classification, change-control processes, and approval routing.

Incorporate new items

Add products from new entities to master and centralize subsequent data management following defined governance.

Propagate product information

Refresh item data in new entities with master records and automatically synchronize updates from master.

Manage ongoing activities

Add, delete, or modify master item definition to meet the demands of new business requirements.

Tailored Action Plan

Item Mastering for the Value Chain

Your Challenge

“I need a more efficient process for defining, governing, changing, and publishing item master data.”

Your Objective

Establish a best-practice approach to managing your item master in a hybrid-cloud environment.

Your Action Points

Maintain unified and accurate item records for a 360-degree view of product information.
Perform real-time validations for completeness and accuracy.
Establish workflow and change-management processes.
Synchronize item data across cloud and on-premises applications.
Enable agility and reduce cost in the cloud.

Product Commercialization

How will your company maintain unified and accurate item records?

With manual and inefficient commercialization processes, products often get to market late with inaccurate or incomplete information, resulting in lost sales, customer dissatisfaction, high warranty expense, and increased operational costs.

To empower a streamlined commercialization process, organizations need clean and consistent product data that is delivered to its sales channels, while simultaneously running their supply chain and ERP processes. With a modern product data management solution in the cloud, businesses can accelerate time to market, gain competitive advantage, and reduce costs by running their entire product commercialization process on dependable product data.

Having a 45 percent higher customersatisfaction level clearly indicates a preference in the market, and when coupled with new products delivered to market on time, this accelerating improvement leads directly to increased market share and further growth in customer satisfaction.
—Aberdeen Group
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Best-Practice Guide for Product Commercialization

Dispersed Item Records to Unified Master
Product Release to Supply Chain Readiness
New Product to Omnichannel Commerce

Release design for production

Manage signoff process and monitor status via dashboards. Simplify task coordination through secure social collaboration.

Onboard released products

Add the new product, component, and structure definitions to the companywide central repository. Automatically validate data based on preset requirements and send exception notifications.

Add supply chain attributes

Collaborate to set item classification and parameters governing production, purchasing, and fulfillment. Allow organization-specific attributes and BOMs. Ensure tasks and approvals go to stakeholders only.

Ensure product readiness

Automatically validate product using preconfigured criteria. Streamline issue resolution and approval via rule-based task routing, dashboards, and secure social collaboration.

Propagate product information

Propagate product records to designated organizations including warehouses and plants. Automatically synchronize updates from the master.

Manage ongoing changes

Adjust item definitions and policies for new requirements. Enforce change-control process based on preset rules.

Tailored Action Plan

Product Commercialization

Your Challenge

“I need to aggregate and manage complex product information to accelerate commercialization.”

Your Objective

Accelerate sales, marketing, service, and supply chain readiness to bring successful products to market.

Your Action Points

Streamline ideation to commercialization (I2C) processes on a single platform.
Establish workflow to aggregate required attributes.
Validate product data for commercial and supply chain readiness.
Rapidly publish accurate product information to all sales channels and business partners.

Omnichannel Commerce

How do you ensure product information maintains accuracy across all sales channels?

Today’s businesses are challenged to provide customers with quality and accurate products across numerous channels—web, print catalogs, mobile, and traditional bricks-and-mortar stores. To keep up with high customer expectations, companies need to offer consistent and accurate product information across all these outlets.

An effective PIM system delivers complete and reliable product information to your customers across all your sales channels, and allows you to run your back-end ERP and order-fulfillment systems efficiently. This improves customer satisfaction and loyalty because consumers trust your business to successfully deliver reliable product information, ultimately driving profits.

Best-Practice Guide for Omnichannel Commerce

Dispersed Item Records to Unified Master
Product Release to Supply Chain Readiness
New Product to Omnichannel Commerce

Onboard new products

Add new products released from in-house development or sent by suppliers to centralized repository.

Validate data quality

Automatically check data validity such as completeness and formatting based on preset rules. Send exception notification to stakeholders.

Enrich product information

Collaborate to produce marketing and sales assets, including product collateral and catalogs for different channels and languages. Ensure tasks and approvals go to relevant stakeholders only.

Ensure product readiness

Automatically validate product data using preconfigured criteria. Streamline issue resolution and approval via rule-based task routing, dashboards, and secure social collaboration.

Propagate to channels

Automatically release approved product records to consuming channels, including web store, mobile app, retail POS, customer service, partner, and distributor.

Manage ongoing changes

Update item definitions and assets for new requirements. Enforce change-control process based on preset rules.

Tailored Action Plan

Omnichannel Commerce

Your Challenge

“I need to standardize processes for faster time to market across web, mobile, print, and bricks-and-mortar channels.”

Your Objective

Provide a seamless buying and service experience to customers across multiple channels.

Your Action Points

Provide trading partners with a self-service application to load products and digital assets.
Centrally manage attributes, bundles, digital assets, and catalogs.
Maintain product data for different channels, geographies, and trading partners.
Publish consistent product data across various order-capture and fulfillment systems.

Contract Manufacturer Collaboration

How do you manage your contract manufacturing process flow today? What is your level of collaboration maturity with your partners?

Today, most manufacturing is performed by third-party manufacturers or contract manufacturers (CMOs). Yet many organizations are not seeing the benefits they expected from outsourcing.

Difficult integrations between ERP and SCM (supply chain management) systems, and inconsistent data standards across the enterprise are common challenges when working with contract manufacturers. This poses financial risk and can result in missed deadlines and lost market opportunities.

A modern cloud-based PIM solution offers multiple avenues for manufacturing partners to provide and receive data from web and mobile supplier portals and automated web services. These processes are automated in the cloud and deliver continuous business-rule validations and verification of data, allowing contract manufacturers to validate the data they provide anywhere and receive accurate information.

This enables your business to benefit from continuous improvement cycles for your contract manufacturing processes by collaborating on all business endeavors, executing quality control, distributing joint scorecards, exchanging “what-if” scenarios, and sharing documents that drive efficient business processes.

Partner selection: Information for one product sent to three different contract manufacturers in three different formats.

Tailored Action Plan

Contract Manufacturing

Your Challenge

“I need to collaborate better with my business partners.”

Your Objective

Enable close collaboration with partners for manufacturing, quality control, and supply chain efficiency.

Your Action Points

Centrally manage products and bills of material.
Ensure clean and consistent product data is shared with trading partners.
Enable efficient collaboration and change control.
Leverage real-time analytics and reporting to improve processes.

Learn more at www.oracle.com/producthub

Find out more

Best-Practice Guide for a Unified Item Master

Review item records

Standardize item definition

Establish data governance

Incorporate new items

Propagate product information

Manage ongoing activities

Tailored Action Plan

Item Mastering for the Value Chain

Your Challenge

Your Objective

Your Action Points

Find out more

Best-Practice Guide for Product Commercialization

Release design for production

Onboard released products

Add supply chain attributes

Ensure product readiness

Propagate product information

Manage ongoing changes

Tailored Action Plan

Product Commercialization

Your Challenge

Your Objective

Your Action Points

Best-Practice Guide for Omnichannel Commerce

Onboard new products

Validate data quality

Enrich product information

Ensure product readiness

Propagate to channels

Manage ongoing changes

Tailored Action Plan

Omnichannel Commerce

Your Challenge

Your Objective

Your Action Points

Tailored Action Plan

Contract Manufacturing

Your Challenge

Your Objective

Your Action Points

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