Why is Akeneo an exceptional PIM system?
PIM (Product Information Management) are enterprise-level product information management application. It is a business and information technology model designed to effectively manage information about products in the assortment. The PIM system is eagerly used in e-Commerce activities because it significantly facilitates online store operation and creates positive customer experience in contact with the company’s operations. The main goal of PIM is to distribute product information to all channels supported by the company, e.g. e-commerce websites, mobile applications as well as printed materials. Thanks to this solution, you gain more control over running your business. One of the most popular solution available at the market is Akeneo.
Akeneo – Product Information Management
Akeneo is one of the tools you can use to manage your product information. It allows you to create multiple content distribution channels, adjusted to your current needs. You can customize each of them so that they can be prepared for gathering a specific type of information.
What is the difference between Akeneo and different systems? First of all, there is one significant feature. This solution is very young due to the product’s life cycle. It means that Akeneo was designed to meet current market needs in terms of functionality and business. Thanks to this, the program’s interface is transparent and aesthetic and navigating the next tabs is simple and very intuitive.
Akeneo bases its actions on Oro Platform. It’s a high quality software that can be constantly developed. What’s more, it is a PIM tool with an open-source code and extensive community that supports the app. It means that by choosing Akeneo as a product information management system, you are connected with more than one service provider.
How does Akeneo work?
The most important task of every PIM tool is collecting and storing information from all sources available in a given company. These include product databases, internal systems, ERP and various types of files, e.g. XML, XLS, CSV, etc. Unfortunately, data storage is only half of the success. Completing them and later editing becomes more difficult. Fortunately, Akeneo is there to help. This tool facilities the process of collecting data thanks to built-in mechanisms for importing them. By using it, you can automate this process by creating import templates. It will make it easier for you to operate even very complex data sources.
Main functions
When you have already collected product information in your database, you have to complete it accordingly. You do not always have complete data in the sources from which you imported it. Most often, you do not immediately have comprehensive assortment descriptions, satisfying the customer’s requirements. You can expand your product data thanks to Akeneo and easily make multi-level and multi-group categorization of products. It allows you to give them the appropriate attributes. You can also expand product descriptions to make them attractive to both users and Google search robots. Akeneo lets you enrich your information with multimedia files and other attachments, as well as you can create the right links between different products. You can do this even in many languages and for different channels separately.
Once you have all the prepared data, you can share it with all distribution channels owned by your company. Akeneo tool will help you with this. Its mechanisms will allow you to create any data exchange files and distribute this data via the connector directly to the given sales channel.
Simply put, the entire product information management process from Akeneo consists in collecting, enriching and sharing data. All of these activities are necessary for the efficient management in e-commerce. In addition, by choosing Akeneo, you get more options to configure different variants of groups, create product families, relationship types as well as types of currencies. Therefore, itsatisfies even very high expectations and significantly relieves the people responsible for administering the company’s product data.
Akeneo and Pimcore
When you choose a product information management system, you can also use the Pimcore software. It is an open source PIM platform that allows you to manage your data in an automatic way. Additionally it takes care of building a positive User Experience of your customers.
Like Akeneo, the tool is easy to use. However, in addition to managing information about the product, Pimcore also manages the content contained on the website. It can cooperate with the product and complex data without any problem. The application also has the ability to manage digital resources (DAM) and to personalize customer experience by building user profiles. It enables management of many different data segments. Unlike Pimcore, Akeneo offers solutions for companies that want to manage only their product information.
Depending on how big your business is and how many data you want to administer, you can choose the right tool to manage your product information.
