Why Your PIM Needs Built-In ETL Tools

PIM and ETL

Considering PIMs to be an IT-driven initiative is one of the worst mistakes enterprises may make when implementing them. Indeed, they have vital back-end connections to several e-commerce platforms. Yes, for your eCommerce sites to load correctly, they might require large-scale ETL tasks to import data and provide it in the right format. And that is important.

However, as they say, “garbage in, garbage out.” If you don’t get high-quality product data, it won’t matter how many integrations you perform. Furthermore, there’s a strong likelihood that your product data is erratic and dispersed if your enrichment procedure is.

ETL and PIM

PIM organizes and centralizes all product-related information in one location. SKUs, product descriptions, pictures, and other elements are some examples of these. To facilitate seamless dissemination across channels, the data is categorized and updated continuously to ensure correctness. PIM solely handles product data information, whereas ETL lacks this exclusivity.

Within a company, the ETL process utilizes all kinds of data. It gathers information from multiple sources, both structured and unstructured, and processes it by business rules before storing it in a shared data repository for additional study.

PIM and Extract Transform Load

Procedures for data loading, transfer, accumulation, and integration are necessary for data distribution and consolidation in PIM. Thus, we can infer that ETL procedures are necessary for PIM operations. Extensive ETL operations are required to exchange product information with marketing, sales, retailing, product management, and other eCommerce organizations.

Data must be imported into PIM and sent out in the appropriate format to the necessary distribution channels. To be helpful for certain use cases, the product data must be integrated and enhanced inside this sequence of actions. ETL takes care of all of this.

Although the fundamental concepts of PIM and ETL are the same—centralizing, enhancing, and distributing data to various channels—ETL functions as a PIM subset process. Although it is not exclusive to PIM platforms, the ETL process is used in them. It is a data integration solution that is essential to the administration and distribution of product data and is utilized in many data warehousing elements for pertinent business analytics and insights.

PIM ETL Tutorial

Here is a step-by-step tutorial on a PIM ETL:

Extraction

Gathering your assets from every system you oversee is the first stage in the ETL process. Assets may originate from project drives, document warehouses, visual libraries, content management systems (CMS), digital asset management (DAM) systems, and more. You combine the existing, both structured and unstructured content from your many platforms and apps into a single database.

Your team can manually carry out extraction using export techniques found in their specific application or system, or they can use ETL solutions that can automate a significant portion of the extraction procedure. After finishing the task, you can proceed to the transformation procedure.

Transform

You will take all of your data and organize and standardize your assets during the transformation process. First things first, you must establish data standards that apply to all of your assets and don’t depend on the original system or application. Standards establish uniformity, which enhances asset discovery and accessibility within your DAM and across other platforms.

The goal of the transformation process is to make your assets more straightforward and consistent. All platforms and apps should have a common format or content type, along with common metadata and asset access methods.

Load

It’s time to move all of your assets to a single server that can be accessed and called by your DAM along with other applications. The process of “loading” involves ingesting your assets into a single, centralized database or repository that is flexible enough to distribute pertinent content or asset information to your other systems. The data integration is strengthened and made advantageous for your company and end users during the “Load” process.

Differences Between ETL and PIM

The procedure known as extract, translate, and load, or ETL, takes data out of its source, modifies it for the new source, and then loads it. It is hard to believe that more than 90% of businesses still use laborious Excel spreadsheets as their ETL tool. Spreadsheets make this a laborious operation, even though it has been the standard procedure for decades.

This is because spreadsheets still rely on manual procedures. They therefore don’t have the scalability you require to grow your product lines. Excel’s capacity to handle data is also constrained, which implies your business isn’t scalable.

In contrast to laborious spreadsheet ETL procedures, a PIM utilizes workflow logic to facilitate the creation and reconstruction of data for the onboarding procedure. All of your data is organized in one place, saving you from having to deal with numerous spreadsheets and tabs. As a result, creating and organizing new data templates is simple.

It can become incredibly complex because every product has a unique set of attributes. However, sorting through attribute sets becomes simpler when using a PIM, as it divides them into three sections. For instance, in the case of length, you would also have the number and the unit of measurement that were utilized to get it.

ETL Tool

The following are the main types of ETL tools:

Open-Source

These ETL tools give companies the freedom to plan how they want to share their data and provide them with access to the source code. The way they work will differ depending on the application.

Enterprise Software

These powerful ETL tools were created especially for business use. They are more sophisticated since they assist business organizations and provide a wide range of data documentation features.

Customized

These are ETL tools that a company builds from the ground up with its chosen technology stack. Since custom ETL technologies are made to meet the specific requirements of each enterprise, they provide flexibility.

Cloud-Based

Because these ETL solutions are cloud-hosted, enterprises may save their data safely. They are scalable, adaptable, and incredibly efficient, meeting a company’s growing needs for data processing.

PIM and Extract Transform Load

To increase your market shares in e-commerce, you will want excellent oversight and flexible product data. Because of this, companies may capitalize on fresh opportunities and increase productivity and return on investment (ROI) across all channels.

No coding is needed mostly to standardize and clean data, optimize for ROI, and customize data for every single target channel. You can take information directly out of your PIM or combine it from many sources; use simple rule boxes to automatically customize each piece of information for every target channel; and then syndicate that material according to a timetable that suits you. This is everything you’ll need to transform unprocessed data into effective customer-facing advertisements using PIM and ETL tools.

Bottom line

PIM allows organizations to help manage their data effectively and efficiently. Efficient management tools can significantly help attribute an organization’s performance and valuation. You can contact Pimberly if you require management tools that work best for you.