Internet Retailer has an article speaking of the benefits of Product Information Management systems (PIM). Product Information Management (PIM) is a solution to maintain product data across different business units and groups within the enterprise. A collaborative solution, PIM provides a central repository for the Product Data with all its attributes thus enabling effective Data Synchronization.

The article talks of problems in retail arena and how PIM solves these problems.

The trouble is that many retail operations are divided into silos of information specific to each operating department, each of which may have received a different version of product data from separate sources within the same supplier. “It’s hard to get a single source of truth,” says Michael Parrish, senior vice president of business process management for West Marine Inc., a Watsonville, Calif.-based chain of more than 360 boating supply stores.

To meet the challenge of data overload in multiple versions of the truth, West Marine and other retailers, as well as their suppliers, are moving toward product information management systems, or PIM, that use web technology to streamline and automate data flow and make it simpler and faster for multiple departments to view and work with the same product information.

Not to be confused with general data synchronization between suppliers and retailers, which deals with invoices, purchase orders and other supply chain issues, PIM applications push deep into a retailer’s operation to assure that product data is synchronized across all of a retailer’s internal applications.