When Storing Product Data Isn’t Enough: MDM vs PIM

A heavyweight MDM can store and govern your product data perfectly and still slow your teams down. Here’s where an older MDM falls short for day-to-day product work, and how a product-data-first PIM gets everyday work moving again.

Most teams don’t pick a product data platform expecting it to become the bottleneck. They buy it to bring order to messy supplier data, keep technical and compliance information accurate, and get product content out to every channel. On paper, a heavyweight master data management (MDM) platform looks like the safe choice. It can model almost anything and govern data across the business.

Then the platform goes live, and a different problem appears. The data is in there, but working with it day to day is hard. This is the gap that rarely shows up in a requirements document, and it’s exactly where a product information management (PIM) platform built for everyday use earns its place.

To be fair, a heavyweight MDM earns its place where the real need is governing several data domains at once, including customer, supplier, location, and product data, across a large enterprise. But if product data is the problem you’re actually trying to solve, a platform built specifically for that work usually fits the day-to-day reality better. That difference is what this post is about.

Key Takeaways

• A platform can store and govern product data well and still slow the business down, because storage and day-to-day usability are different problems
• Older MDM systems often concentrate capability in a few specialists, leaving wider teams waiting on a queue
• Change is slow and costly when new attributes, workflows, or outputs each require a project, specialist time, or a third party
• Supplier onboarding stays manual without structured submission and validation, and downstream outputs stay hand-built
• The real cost is rarely the licence. It’s the ongoing effort of changing, supporting, and using the platform
• Pimberly takes a product-data-first approach that gives operational teams more control with governance still in place

The Data Is There. Using It Is the Problem.

A platform can be excellent at storing and governing product data and still be a drag on the people who use it every day. If you’re evaluating options, or quietly wondering whether your current setup is helping or hindering, it’s worth looking at where older MDM platforms tend to fall down for product work.

1. Everyday Tasks Need a Specialist

The platform is powerful, but the interface is technical and dated. Enriching a record, adjusting a workflow, or publishing to a new channel isn’t something a merchandiser or product manager can do confidently on their own. Capability ends up concentrated in a small group of experts, and everyone else joins a queue. Adoption slows, and lean teams carry the strain.

2. Change Is Slow and Expensive

When the business needs a new attribute, a new workflow, or a new output, the answer is often a project: scoping, specialist time, sometimes a third party, and a wait. Even small changes carry cost and delay. A platform that can’t keep up with the business stops being an asset and starts being a constraint.

3. There’s a Middleman Between What You Ask For and What You Get

Many enterprise MDM platforms are delivered through system integrators. That adds layers between the business need and the build, and every layer is a chance for delay, extra cost, and something getting lost in translation.

4. Supplier Onboarding Stays Manual

Storing supplier data is not the same as making it easy to collect. Without structured submission and validation, teams are still chasing spreadsheets, fixing errors, and rekeying incomplete data before it’s usable. The work stays inside the business when it should sit upstream with the supplier.

5. Downstream Outputs Are Still Hand-Built

Datasheets, catalogs, and customer-specific exports often sit outside the core platform’s strengths. So even with governed data in place, producing the documents customers actually need stays a manual, repetitive job that drifts out of date.

6. The Real Cost Isn’t the Licence

The licence is the part everyone sees. The rest is harder to spot until you add it up: implementation services, change requests, specialist resource or third-party support, infrastructure, and the internal hours spent keeping everything moving. For many businesses the true operating cost is a multiple of the licence fee, and most of it is the effort of running and changing the platform rather than owning it.

None of this means the platform can’t model the data. It usually can. The issue is the effort it takes to change, enrich, onboard, and reuse that data once you’re live.

A Product-Data-First Approach

Pimberly is built around the work itself, not just the data model. Onboarding, enrichment, approvals, asset management, and publishing are designed for the operational teams who use them, so people get productive faster and depend less on a handful of specialists.

When something needs to change, business users have more control over product structures, attributes, workflows, and outputs, with governance, permissions, and approvals still in place. Governance and dependency are not the same thing. You keep the controls and lose the bottleneck.

A few things follow from that approach:

• A Vendor Portal with built-in validation moves supplier onboarding upstream, so data arrives more complete and needs less internal cleanup.
• Datasheets, catalogs, and exports are generated from live, governed product data, which cuts manual document work and keeps outputs aligned when data changes.
• Implementation and support are delivered in-house, so there’s one accountable relationship rather than a chain of intermediaries.

The point isn’t more features. It’s less friction around the activities that quietly drive cost and slow teams down.

What This Looks Like in Practice: EVO Group

EVO Group had been running on a legacy MDM system that made time-to-market slow and multi-channel data management complex. The data was managed, but the day-to-day effort of working with it was holding the business back. Product information sat across systems, changes took longer than the business wanted, and getting consistent content out to web, print, and reseller channels meant repeated manual work.

After moving to Pimberly, EVO Group consolidated more than 90,000 SKUs, achieved 40% faster time-to-market, and put 45 automated workflows in place for enrichment and approvals. Product content stayed consistent across web, print, and APIs, with less manual work and more accurate data across customer and reseller touchpoints.

The move wasn’t about whether the old system could hold the data. It was about how much effort it took to change, enrich, and reuse that data, and what the business could do once that effort came down.

But What About the Switch?

If you’re on a mature MDM, the honest reaction to all of this is usually “fine, but moving sounds like a project in itself.” It’s a fair concern, and worth being straight about. Any serious migration needs proper scoping, and that work shouldn’t be glossed over.

In practice, two things tend to make the move less daunting than expected. First, businesses rarely need to replicate their old setup attribute for attribute. A lot of the complexity in a legacy system is accumulated rather than necessary, so the move is often a chance to simplify rather than rebuild. Second, the decision isn’t only about the effort of switching. It’s also about the ongoing cost and friction of staying put. When a platform is slowing the business down every week, the bigger risk is often standing still.

The useful question isn’t “how hard is it to move?” in isolation. It’s “what is staying where we are actually costing us, and for how much longer?”

The Questions Worth Asking

Whether you’re evaluating a platform or living with one already, the useful test isn’t whether it can store complex product data. Most can. The better questions are simpler, and worth scoring your current setup against honestly:

• Can the people doing the work make routine changes without specialist help?
• When the business needs something new, how quickly and confidently can the team deliver it?
• How much of the team’s week goes on chasing suppliers, fixing spreadsheets, and rekeying data?
• Beyond the licence, what is the platform really costing you in time and effort?

If the answers point to too much waiting, too much manual work, and too much dependency, the platform isn’t just holding your product data. It’s holding the business back. The right one does the opposite: it helps you move.