3 Simple Ways to Onboard Large Quantities of Item Data

1) Utilize data integration platforms

Manual tasks are often at the heart of inefficiencies. Therefore, deploying a data integration platform provides a powerful tool to consolidate and harmonize data from various sources into a single, unified system. By leveraging these platforms, you can significantly simplify the onboarding process for large quantities of item data, freeing up your team to tackle higher-value tasks. Eliminating manual data entry and leveraging software creates seamless data extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) operations. As a result, your organization can:

• Reduce manual data entry errors through data integration automation
• Enjoy real-time data synchronization to harmonize large quantities of data
• Attain scalability with a cloud-based database
• Enable collaboration across the entire enterprise
• Create data democracy to empower all levels to utilize data to make smarter business decisions

2) Implement a modern PIM

A product information management system or PIM provides a central repository for consistent and accurate large quantities of data. Modern PIMs have built-in AI capabilities, enabling you to define and manage essential data elements without the worry of human error. Your PIM also creates a single source of truth for all your product information, including product descriptions, SKUs, and pricing, keeping everything in a structured and standardized manner to suit your needs. A PIM enables you to:

• Maintain data consistency for multi-channel and omnichannel distribution across all marketing platforms and eCommerce marketplaces
• Improve data quality with enriched data and marketplace-specific formatting
• Enhance collaboration across internal players such as your eCommerce, marketing, and product management teams and external stakeholders such as distributors, vendors, and suppliers
• Geo customize data, including currency, translations, and local terminology
• Automate critical functions, including the collection and organization of product attributes
• Leverage AI to automate product description creation

Also, a modern PIM uses AI-powered attribute extraction, enabling you to:

• Access different sources to identify and extract product attributes from reliable sources and marketplaces, giving you instant access to the most up-to-date, correct product information
• Monitor sources to identify changes and automatically update attributes in your PIM
• Use image recognition to analyze uploaded images and instantly identify relevant product attributes and apply relevant tags based on an 80% threshold confidence level or user-defined features

3) Employ data migration and mapping techniques

Data mapping connects data fields from one source to data fields in another source, helping to standardize data in understandable formats. When onboarding large quantities of item data, employing mapping techniques as part of your data migration is crucial to ensure a smooth transition and eliminate errors. Properly mapping the data fields between the source and target systems helps maintain data relationships and coherence. It covers important steps to ensure smooth transitions, including:

• Only migrating necessary data free of duplicates, redundancies, and outdated information
• Identifying the data structure of the source data and intended target data to determine if the structure needs to change
• Enabling transformation for incompatible structures to suit your target structure
• Creating a map that shares processing instructions for migration
• Testing the mapping process to make sure everything is ready to migrate with reduced risk of error

Benefits of mapping when onboarding large quantities of item data

Mapping helps ensure you preserve the integrity of the data and that it works within your existing structures. The benefits of employing data migration and mapping techniques include:

• You remove any possible bugs for a smoother migration
• You enjoy enhanced data security using data encryption during transmission and once the data migrates, protecting against unauthorized access and breaches
• Time and cost savings by improved efficiencies so you can optimize your resources more effectively
• Minimal disruption due to testing to predict possible challenges and find solutions to smooth out the migration process

Adopting these three methods addresses common challenges of onboarding vast amounts of item data, including:

• Aggregating large quantities of data
• Onboarding data from various sources and in varying states
• Receiving and/or tracking data from multiple users
• Data security during the migration process

The bottom line is that a manual, insufficient data onboarding process takes too much time, costs too much money, and is prone to errors. This is doubly true when your team is trying to manually clean and validate the data. Using these three techniques ensures your system is up to the task, that the large quantities of data will be transferred in a usable format, and that it will safely reside in a secure repository.