How Electrical and Mechanical Brands Can Leverage Complex Product Data

As an Electrical/Mechanical company, you know the complex data you deal with isn’t pretty or easy to manage. Your team struggles with day-to-day manual tasks that are time wasters, taking technical teams away from the things they do best: developing and improving your product offering. When you realize your team can free up as much as 30% of their time with the assistance of a PIM, you also realize your team can apply their expertise to product expansion. Even if the growth of your product line isn’t part of your business strategy, your team has more time to focus on product improvements and updates to remain competitive.

Complex product data should benefit your company instead of being nothing more than a hassle. It should be at the core of your sales strategy, ensuring distributors, resellers and consumers can quickly access your product information and make informed decisions that increase revenues. However, this is only possible when your team has the right PIM in place.

To enjoy growth, you not only need to streamline and automate your complex data processes but also optimize your data to increase sales. You can do this by increasing the visibility of the complex data for your end user, whether it is via an online portal, company website, brand eCommerce store, or marketplace. In this whitepaper, we look at how your electrical/mechanical brand can leverage complex product data with the assistance of product information management.

This is about an 18-minute read, so grab a coffee or a snack and get comfortable – let’s simplify some complex topics.

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Introduction

As an electrical/mechanical manufacturer, distributor, or supplier, you deal with complex product data every day. All that data works together with overlaps and intricate details, making it especially dense once you get down to the component level of each product. Because each component varies in size, compatibility, materials, tolerances etc., it presents a formidable amount of product information and SKUs that your team needs to manage and constantly update.

Complications can arise at any stage of getting a product to market. However, with complex product data, these issues increase. For example, you might be managing not only new product launches but the latest version of a product update/version. When this happens, ensuring you have access to the last version of your complex product description is the only way to maintain consistency. The older the last version, the more difficult it can be to track down.

You want to build longevity into your products. This way, your estate of products will last a very long time. Even after you have stopped selling a product, there will typically be a significant warranty and legislative period for which you will need to keep the product information.

Also, complex products often call for backward compatibility to help ensure older versions of their technical products are always available. Without effective complex product data processes, these versions can be lost when companies upgrade or shift direction with products. Meanwhile, one product may have multiple part codes depending on the use case or brand. All these challenges create one massive, unmanageable beast.

At some point, you need to consider how you can reduce the time and effort when managing complex product data. Your goal is to see efficiencies across your entire process, from product development to getting your product to the end user. To enjoy growth, you not only need to streamline and automate your complex data processes but also optimize your data to increase sales. You can do this by increasing the visibility of the complex data for your end user, whether it is via an online portal, company website, brand eCommerce store, or marketplace.

Here we look at how your electrical/mechanical brand can leverage complex product data with the assistance of product information management software (PIM).

What constitutes ‘complex product data’?

Many retailers and manufacturers deal with relatively simple product data with a 3-tier structure consisting of style, color, and size. For example, when dealing with fashion and apparel, often the data is relatively limited with major concerns and information dealing with color, size/fit, material, and dimensions. In this case, digital assets are also simple, with a series of standard images or videos to show the products from various angles.

Complex product data arises when the technical products consist of many different parts, all with their own specific components, dozens of configurations, including conditional configurations where customers choose different options that then limit them from adding the other options available.

Accompanying documentation and digital assets can be vast and highly technical. You must oversee safety data sheets, spec sheets, test data, 3D CADs, and significantly more images. These are not only of the product itself, but for situations presented by various applications. That’s a mouthful of information, which is a big reason it’s considered complex product data.

A common scenario for complex product data is a sprinkler system kit. When customers order a sprinkler system, several different technical products make up the kit, such as a cart, pumps, and hoses. Each product in the kit adapts with a very specific component and covers different specifications based on performance, such as the flow range and coverage for the cart and the maximum flow and pressure for the pump. As a result, complex product data also requires more in-depth spec and sell sheets listing many attributes unique to each product in the kit. In some cases, these product attributes are in ranges, such as the flow range based on a gallon per minute, while others, such as the hose length, are based on the number of feet.

With the immense amount of information related to each product, one of the simplest ways to help manage the specs is to use templates. Manufacturers and distributors often use product data templates as they make it easier for sellers to find the information they wish to include in their own consumer-facing product descriptions.

The only problem with product data templates is that they are usually completed and managed by engineers left to their own devices to create and oversee spec sheet production. As a result, many headaches come with not only managing the data but also formatting it to meet the needs of their end-user. This process is typically completed manually by plugging in specs from original spreadsheets.

Because the process is time-consuming and monotonous, a spec sheet is usually created once for a new product release, with updates made only when absolutely necessary. Even then, when a spec sheet is updated, the original data is often so old it’s missing and lost in a mass of other information. This information is also not easily searched because it is commonly stored in an individual Product Engineer’s workspace. Lose that engineer and you permanently lose that information.

Signs you are dealing with complex product data

You know you’re dealing with complex data when:

Data comes from multiple sources: If your final spec sheets combine data from multiple sources, this is a sure sign you’re dealing with complex data. Whether it is from different tables and sources created internally or data across a list of suppliers contributing components, the more sources you have contributing to your product information, the more chance it is complex. The more stakeholders involved in product information development, the more likely it is you are using “dispersed data” that you are constantly gathering from multiple locations.
You manage big data calling for massive memory: Poorly managed product data can often cause memory issues, but this is not what we’re talking about here. In this case, it’s all about managing massive amounts of raw data choking your database’s memory. Tall and wide data also come into play here, maxing out your spreadsheets’ capacity and in turn the spreadsheet’s ability to manage the data effectively.
Granularity: If your data seems to drill down to more finite and finite information, this is usually a sign you’re dealing with highly complex product data. Granular drill-downs call for large amounts of data that become very difficult to translate into user-friendly bites of information.
Updates: Highly complex products, especially electronics and computers, constantly undergo version updates. If you’re dealing with ongoing updates, overrides, and version changes, this puts strain on your team to ensure they can update and re-ingest the new information effectively and accurately.

What kinds of companies deal with complex product data?

There are four types of companies typically managing complex product data:

Manufacturers/Brands

Although manufacturers produce products across thousands of categories, some are far more complex than others. As mentioned, there is a vast difference between clothing and mechanical items such as sprinkler systems. Electronic and mechanical manufacturers deal with complex product data. Typically, these products use hundreds to thousands of components, each with its own SKU number. Manufacturers specializing in niche products are left to find efficient ways to manage the immense amount of complex product data attached to each component.

Manufacturers also have to keep a record of ASIN numbers, GTINs (UPC/EAN codes) to sell their products online according to the standards set by both GS1 and Amazon. Because eCommerce has made it easier to sell directly to consumers than ever, these details add to the challenges of managing complex product data at the manufacturers’ level. However, the most important complex information tool used by manufacturers to share information is the ETIM.

Manufacturers often use European Technical Information Model or ETIM to classify and share product information with distributors or resellers. It ensures there are no ambiguities with important technical characteristics of products that could eventually lead to disconnects along the supply chain. It provides a single source directly from the manufacturer, so resellers and distributors share consistent product information with consumers. Most use a single model to share their complex information streamlining the process. However, all models include the following entities:

Product groups
Product classes (categories)
Synonyms (alternative keywords)
Features (product attributes)
Values
Units

Every product has a relevant class, with a uniform grid that structures and organizes product data. As a result, there is also clarity in complex product descriptions and a group structure ideal for electronic and mechanical products that are processed together.

Distributors

Distributors act as the middleman between manufacturers and other entities such as wholesalers, retailers, resellers, and direct-to-consumer scenarios based on the manufacturers’ goals. They help the manufacturer expand their reach and sell their products at different stages of the supply chain, from warehousing to eCommerce.

Because distributors represent multiple products and brands, they are left holding the bag when it comes to complex product data when creating value-added solutions for their customers. As a result, distributors need complex data to be exact to meet customers’ requirements. Very often, the more complex the parts, the more specificity is needed for product information at this level.

Resellers/Retailers

Resellers/retailers are often the ones in the hot seat when it comes to sharing complex product data, as it has to be accurate and easy to understand for consumers. Their brand depends on customer trust, which is difficult to acquire when product data is incorrect or misleading. Because they are not the direct source of the product, resellers and retailers need to choose reliable products and brands to protect their own brand image. However, they also need accurate data and are forced to manage data in multiple formats to put together consumer-friendly information.

Suppliers

Suppliers are B2B companies responsible for materials or components for product manufacturers. They must ensure they have their ducks in a row regarding their complex product data, as it contributes to the overall product data the manufacturer must manage. Requirements tend to be particularly strict since the transaction sizes are much larger and often under certain industry standards that demand transparency. Suppliers often manage the finicky components that have complex data yet tend to use spreadsheets to keep track of their data. This poses a problem right down the supply chain.

How can electrical/mechanical companies leverage complex product data with a PIM?

Your electrical or mechanical company can leverage complex product data if you have effective tools to streamline your process. Product information management software, or PIM, is the most efficient tool for managing complex product data. It allows you to not only store data in one place but also then upload, share, store, archive, and maintain data. As a result, a PIM allows you to leverage complex product data more effectively.

Remain a reliable business partner

A PIM offering sell and spec sheet templates ensures you always provide data based on a single model to keep it consistent. Templates also ensure your company remains compliant as they provide a specific field to enter all industry-related information. Templates reduce or even eliminate human error because they provide clear and concise guidelines engineers and other players use to enter the information. A PIM also eliminates the use of cumbersome spreadsheets and other manual processes that contribute to errors. As a result, your complex product data allows you to remain a reliable business resellers and distributors are happy to work with.

Optimize product data pages

PIMs are designed to manage product information and make it easier to include attributes. When it comes to specs, PIM allows you to easily showcase the right specs in the cleanest way possible, ideal for optimizing product detail pages. As a result, you create improved customer experiences, whether it is in your B2B relationships or when you are selling directly to consumers.

If you are selling B2B, you can’t overlook the importance of customer experience. How you interact with them impacts their bottom line. They want to work with companies that create a seamless purchasing experience to improve efficiencies throughout their supply chain. If their team has to navigate your site and your product detail page isn’t optimized, they must dig around to find what they need. This wastes time.

It’s entirely possible the customer needs a part of a product they’ve purchased before or a repeat purchase too. It is imperative to make it super simple to execute in these instances. Your PIM highlights essential information. Additionally, it allows you to share deeper dive details when required.

A robust PIM also includes a digital asset management tool (DAM), allowing you to make the most of your digital assets. For example, 3D Vector Images can be managed in the same way as the rest of your product information, giving customers an exact idea of what they are buying. These are specifically important for products used as parts/components of a much larger technical product (i.e., a building or aircraft). You can also share instructional videos to enhance the discovery process, leveraging all the data available to improve customer experience.

Automate product data sheets & attribution

It takes a lot of effort to produce an accurate technical spec sheet that has all the necessary attributes, images, drawings, and dimensions. The sheet is usually pulled together by a Technical Product Manager, then given to a Graphic Designer to create an easy-to-read, brand compliant document. Technical spec sheets are also part of your legal contract of supply, such as the specifications.

So, there is a lot that goes into getting one of these set up properly.

The problem is if anything on the spec sheet changes, then the current spec sheet is rendered out of date. Even further, creating a new one based on a single change is an extremely cumbersome task.

Automated spec and sell sheets greatly reduce your time-to-market. As a result, you maintain a competitive edge by introducing new models and technology as soon as it is approved and ready to sell. Your team can be confident that the product data sheets are being updated accordingly without manually checking the information against other unwieldy documents or spreadsheets. As mentioned, your PIM is a single source of truth for your entire product catalog, which means it is essentially absorbed by the PIM platform. Once absorbed, any adjustments you make are reflected in the platform seamlessly.

Generate compelling product descriptions for technical products

A PIM also allows you to protect your brand image, facilitating the creation of compelling product descriptions. Despite difficulties describing complex electrical and mechanical products, your team can easily create attention-grabbing descriptions to increase sales. Creative teams don’t have to sort through all the complex data and instead can quickly discover the most important information thanks to automated data sheets and templates.

Product data sheets are already optimized so writers can see what they need and match it to suitable digital assets from your centralized product information hub. There are no worries about sharing incorrect information because your PIM allows you to create error alerts should your product development team miss anything in the criteria you set. Before the information is uploaded to a consumer-facing platform, the warnings also come into play, letting the publisher know when critical information is missing.

Why Pimberly is the best suited for electrical/mechanical companies

Electrical and mechanical manufacturers must serve high-quality product data across many channels and locations and in specific formats. All of this is easily managed with Pimberly. Pimberly combines an effective DAM to manage unstructured data, so your PIM manages your digital and text-based data seamlessly. It is best suited for electrical/mechanical companies because it is all about ease of use, streamlining, and automating tedious manual processes. Our PIM facilitates the management and distribution of complex product data across multiple channels in multiple languages, ensuring your distributors/resellers have total confidence in the quality of the product data they publish.

Automated Spec and Sell Sheets

The manual spec and sell sheet lifecycle increases the risk of errors because the process includes so many touchpoints. Pimberly offers automated spec and sell sheets, making dealing with each department easier while providing more control because there is only one source of information. Your teams no longer contend with several versions of product information floating around and instead work from the latest version. Automation also ensures the process is followed to a tee for each sheet, reducing the risk of serious errors that can lead to legal penalties, fines, and PR nightmares.

Our automation helps you remain compliant with industry legislation, thanks to templates that tell contributors exactly what information is required. Your team can then access the digital assets and content they need, working in a collaborative environment where efficiency and productivity are improved. Each person knows they are always working with the most up-to-date version, and when accessing digital assets, have everything they need in one central location.

Our PIM creates automated workflows to avoid redundancies because everyone works from the same page. You always maintain the highest standard for your complex product information, improving optics for your brand when dealing with B2B or B2C customers. This approach protects your branded information, so it appears consistent across all channels and throughout the stages of the supply chain.

Whether you are dealing with internal teams, suppliers, or other stakeholders, everyone involved in the creating, editing, updating, and deploying spec and sell sheets becomes part of a seamless process with improved collaboration that expedites time to market.

At the same time, streamlined workflows reduce manual tasks and errors, providing more time for both your team and the teams of your partners to focus on higher-value tasks. This presents an attractive prospect to distributors, resellers, and suppliers who realize the cost gains when dealing with a manufacturing company that saves them time. As a result, you partner with industry-leading companies to improve your own profile as an industry leader.

Pimberly’s automation ensures a product is pushed to the correct template and reduces errors by automatically populating product data to overwrite older versions. A new PDF is then saved to our DAM with updated product attributes and the latest information is then ready to share. From the get-go, Pimberly’s development team understood that an effective PIM needs a DAM. Instead of creating a legacy PIM that called for additional functionality or integrations with other DAM software, we included a DAM as a key feature. We became a true PIM capable of managing all product data, whether structured or unstructured.

Whether you’re using Google Sheets, Microsoft Excel, or Zoho Sheets, automated spec and sell sheets offer many advantages over spreadsheets, including:

Speed and efficiency: Spreadsheets limit searchability. Automatic spec and sell sheets are free of tedious searches through rows and columns of information. As a result, everything is faster to complete.
Higher-value work: Tedious work using spreadsheets takes employees away from higher-value work. With automation, they can focus on their respective areas of expertise and stop worrying about getting caught up in minutia.
Sharing: Many companies have a single individual maintaining their product information spreadsheets. Ownership becomes contentious with this setup. Although it is meant to reduce errors through multiple users, it poses an issue that slows down processes and can actually bring the business to a standstill if that person leaves the company. Also, spreadsheets without access or version control capabilities increase the risk of duplicate work.
Eliminate human error: Manual input always increases the risk of human error. The larger and more cumbersome the spreadsheet and the more complex the attributes and technical details involved, the more likely errors will happen. With automation, you reduce manual tasks, simplify how data is presented, and avoid duplicate work and inaccuracies. Also, 100s of columns with tens of thousands of rows make it nearly impossible for data validation, so this step is often simply skipped. Again, this contributes to human errors.
Versions: If you need to manage multiple versions of product information, it is unreasonable to expect people to manage this from a spreadsheet efficiently. Automated spec and sell sheets can be created in multiple versions and formats to suit the needs of each channel or stage of the supply chain. All versions are then accessed from a single location to avoid duplication, which increases the risk of selecting the wrong version.
Audit trails: When errors do happen, spreadsheets don’t offer an easy audit trail to trace where mistakes occur. Although you don’t want errors to create a witch hunt, understanding how errors happen helps improve how your teams work together. It also improves accountability which often helps reduce errors.
Safer sharing and collaboration: Spreadsheets are usually shared via email or worse, in printed form. This increases the risk of proprietary information getting into the wrong hands. Automation streamlines the process and makes it safer to share information using authorized role-based access. This ensures the right people in each department see what they need, empowering multiple departments to work together more effectively. With only one updated version available, you also reduce the risk of outdated information getting into the hands of consumers. As a result, you reduce the risk of liabilities related to misuse or dangerous use of your products.
Integration: Spreadsheets are very limited in their capabilities. As a result, they can’t talk to your ERP, auto-collect data from various supplier feeds, or even provide a place to store text and digital assets in one place. Automated spec and sell sheets do all these things and more, allowing integration with existing systems and PIM/DAM capabilities from one platform. Since spreadsheet programs aren’t designed to manage unstructured data like your digital assets, your team constantly flips back and forth trying to match digital assets to complex product descriptions. This is never the case with automated spec and sell sheets in a PIM/DAM.

Proprietary auto-population from Amazon, Shopify, and eBay

Pimberly is all too familiar with the time-consuming process of creating user-friendly, marketplace-specific product content. Our latest feature allows you to access a product data bank of over 1 billion products through the most popular marketplaces, Amazon, Shopify and eBay. The product look-up allows you to access the bank, which then pulls from the respective marketplace to collect any product information you need. For example, if you are a reseller, you can conduct a search using our new AI to browse the bank and then automatically pull all the information into your Pimberly instance. From there, you can automate or template it to suit your needs.

The ‘bank’ is basically the number of products Einstein can recognize across those three popular channels. The access allows you to leverage all of the information that already exists out there. It creates the ideal, time-saving jumping-off point to quickly and effortlessly get set up in other marketplaces. This is essential when managing large quantities of complex products, as it brings everything you need into your templates, ready to edit for your own purposes. That’s a major time saver.

Also, if you are onboarding new resellers or distributors, you can use AI-generated product attribution to create simplified sell sheets for them. On the flipside, they can find the products they want to sell and pull all the relevant information, sorting it in the format they need. It makes the most of billions of well-composed, marketplace-appropriate product descriptions complete with common attributes to streamline the process, providing confidence your descriptions are in user-friendly terms.

Product attributes can be automated with AI-generated image recognition

As mentioned, Pimberly understands the PIM/DAM connection, which means we are always looking for opportunities to improve DAM functionality. The process is much easier when you can pull text and images into a single pipeline to generate your product attributes. That’s why we decided to leverage image recognition.

Pimberly can take any given photo of a product and pull the attributes from a digital asset alone using AI software. From there, we can perform several tasks using that information, including labeling the content with meta-tags. Meta-tags allow you to perform image content searches while making it easier for your marketing team to add image tags for SEO and enriched product information. Pimberly takes it one step further, creating user-defined criteria to ensure the tags used are relevant to your products.

Image recognition allows you to turn the unstructured data of images into structured product attributes. Using AI, image recognition automatically analyzes uploaded images, identifies and classifies them, and then applies relevant image tags. Tags can be user-defined and, once generated, are used for automated attribution. As a result, your team can quickly onboard new products with accurate attributes and product descriptions.

That auto-generated text-based information is directly related to the images and includes powerful metadata making it easier to create accurate product descriptions. Hence, there is accuracy between your digital assets and output from AI which can also generate three automated product descriptions.

The user-defined information is key as it allows you to combine machine learning with human knowledge. Your team provides valuable input that allows our AI to continuously differentiate similar attributes to improve accuracy. Every time information is confirmed, you improve the machine learning capability of the AI to reduce your team’s effort in the future.

That human input is also key to addressing less tangible characteristics you associate with your brand. This is critical to improving customer experience. For example, image recognition can also be used to recommend similar products based on attributes. This makes it easier for customers to find what they want when something is out of stock or they want to comparison shop between various models. Machine learning tells AI what products go together so customers know what else they need to improve the performance of various electronic and mechanical products. You also increase the average basket size, appealing to more resellers and distributors.

3D Imagery within the platform

Visual support often makes understanding mechanical and electronic products easier, especially at the consumer level. Images provide a reference people can examine when they want to get a better feel for how something works. Today, unstructured data such as 3D vector images and video are essential for creating better customer experiences. Pimberly stores unstructured data like 3D vector images thanks to, you guessed it, our DAM. As mentioned, we designed our PIM with a native true DAM because we understood the important role digital assets play for today’s consumers. You’ll find because of this, it is a far more intuitive PIM than what is known as a ‘legacy PIM’ image repository that tacked on additional functionality. Your images are held and managed in our PIM, so everything works together organically.

AI-generated product descriptions

The more technical a product is, the more difficult it becomes to produce product descriptions in layman’s terms. Because we understand the specific challenges of creating descriptions from complex product data, Pimberly provides AI-generated product descriptions. As with image recognition, AI-generated product descriptions use machine learning to take specific information and turn it into consumer-friendly text. Marketing teams can simply enter small pieces of information, including business, product, character limit, keywords, and tone of voice and the machine learning digests it to produce three variations of the text.

Character limits are one of the most important criteria to generate AI descriptions because each marketplace and many templates you might use have character limits. The more complex your information, the more difficult it is for a writer to zero in on the most important highlights.

Three variations allow marketers to choose the most appropriate version and then finesse it with some quick edits. This prepares a final version that meets SEO and marketplace requirements to use original copy, allowing you to use text for various purposes. You can also optimize your product descriptions using the different variations for quick and easy A/B testing.

Your brand is never compromised because your marketing team still has full reign over creativity. It begins by entering the preferred tone and manner but is then fine-tuned at the editing stage. You have a base product description for your technical products that include the most important highlights while remaining within a specified character count. AI-generated descriptions eliminate the frustration of weeding through complex product data and fussing over character counts, making writing more efficient and fulfilling.

Impressive results

We find sharing real-life stories about our PIM makes it easier to understand its impact on simplifying complex product data processes. Here is one example of how we can help mechanical and electrical manufacturers meet their goals.

The Company:

ATA Group is an internationally recognized manufacturer and distributor of pneumatic grinding tools. With a goal to dominate the global market, they had “a land and expand project” requiring improved functionality of their product information management. ATA has six brands operating in over 90 countries and offering 19,000+ products to a network of over 3,000 distributors and multiple manufacturing sectors. Still managing their product information on spreadsheets and facing language variants for more than 90 countries, ATA’s process was holding them back from reaching their global growth aspirations.

The Challenge:

ATA’s product data was very unstructured as they were managing products across multiple spreadsheets. This resulted in variances in the quality and level of product data across different brands, creating a poor user experience. ATA recognized a growing need for a central data repository for internal teams to manage the enrichment journey of their brands. If it wanted to continue to be a market leader, it needed a new way of working, and it soon realized it was time for a PIM.

The Solution:

With the implementation of Pimberly, ATA was able to:

Onboard all of its products in just five days
Use our locale feature to create German-language variants for its products which it can now feed directly into TradeIt.de for their Karnasch brand
Deploy its first phase quickly, allowing ATA to showcase the functionality to its other business units
Automate and streamline how it manages product data, reducing manual labor hours by 30%
Get its products to market quicker than ever before
Expand to 25,000+ products and growing
Implement a far more effective way to develop and manage products across all six of their brands

Pimberly introduced the ATA team to a new way of working using the power of PIM. ATA now has confidence in the accuracy of its product data and can roll out to other brands, marketplaces, and locales to achieve global dominance.

Conclusion

With Pimberly’s technical sophistication, we make it easy to deal with complex products and a myriad of specs to oversee. ATA is just one example of how we streamline your process throughout the entire product development cycle, making it easy to expand to more countries, manage a network of thousands of distributors and sell your products or components across several sectors.

Our goal is to ensure your PIM implementation is a success. We work with you, assessing your requirements and recommending the most appropriate approach to your PIM project. This includes:

Data modelling
Implementation and transition planning
Integration and connections
Data migration, quality and cleansing
Lifecycle and workflows
Business rules and process mapping

Your team will understand the full capabilities of our PIM with a full skills transfer as a major step in your PIM implementation. We take a train-the-trainers approach, ensuring your team is equipped with everything they need to adapt to their new PIM-driven work environment.

Pimberly’s enterprise-level features provide a powerful platform yet make it easy to install, implement and use even when managing complex product data. The system design empowers mechanical and electronic experts to find a better way to work with complex product data and share it in a user-friendly format whether it is B2B or B2C scenarios.

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