Product Information Management or PIM refers to processes and technologies focused on centrally managing information about products, with a focus on marketing and selling products through one or more distribution channel. Our definition of product content is pretty broad as it includes video, images, audio and documents.
For many of our clients their day to day business evolves around the management and delivery of product information. By understanding current processes and removing bottlencks, we have helped our clients streamline the product managemnet process, in order to support business innovation and growth.
For instance, Woolworths PLC use Unify for managing their product catalogue, web copy, print copy and high resolution photographs. They used to have numerous systems for this workflow but with our deployment they have increased performance by roughly 40%. Diageo store their brand assets on our platform and provide access to 3rd party agencies. Their business case was to move all of their brand collateral into a central repository and give access to hundreds of agencies around the world. This has saved them lots of time and money as before this process was offline and involved shipping CDs across continents. Content based business applications require good workflow capabilities, open standards for integration and have to be flexible to cater for constantly evolving processes.
Read on for more details on how to revolutionise your business processes using Unify.
Workflow
The way content and digital assets are managed varies between companies and departments but also between different content types. Processes do also change as companies evolve. New legal regulations, globalisation and translation are only a couple of factors companies are facing today when implementing workflow processes.
When designing Unify we focused on developing the core elements for workflow while maintaining maximum flexibility.
Implement complex workflows with support for content translation
Workflow is based on the status of content items; Draft, Published, Archived etc. Using the flexibility of the Content Module, you can define your own Metadata schemas catering for your workflow requirements. Permissions can be configured based on status of content items. You can also deploy personalised lists where users are presented with their current tasks and to-do items.
All content is version controlled and for each update we do also store a full audit trail. This means that all changes are logged and you can trace through who made the update and when.
It is also important to be able to notify users when it is their turn to take action. Our messaging module is built for delivering alerts based on triggers within the application. The user interface is tailored based on your requirements and can easily be updated and configured as your company and processes evolve.
Out of the box features: supporting your business processes
Integration
Unify is a standards based Portal and as such an excellent platform for developing a web interface for your back office applications. Our clients, including Icelandair, SCEE and AAT have built their own components which can be placed on any Unify page. These portlets act as an interface to their booking engines and CRM databases.
There are modules for importing and exporting content and we do also support standard web services integration strategies.
Today it is common practice to share content with other sites and embed content from other sites on your own. This is traditionally done using RSS feeds which you can configure in minutes using the Unify platform.
User management and access control
In order to effectively manage your content, you need to think about users and access control. Again, Unify has been deployed in a great variety of IT infrastructures and is used by hundreds of thousands of users globally.
You can deploy multiple users realms, one for your employees based on LDAP, a second for your clients from a CRM database and third for external users running on a database.
Provide single sign on, manage granular access to sites, pages and content.Contact us and tell us how you want to use it, I´m sure we can sort something out.
Collaboration
Business processes are all about collaboration. A team of people creating ideas, making decisions and implementing projects.
The flexibility of Unify and the range of Portlets supplied have helped many of our clients moving their offline processes online. Successful projects include legal sign off, brand asset management, product management and online training.
Some of those applications function as intranets while others are used by 3rd party users on extranets.
Apart from you traditional business process management, we have also found that deploying blogs, commenting functionality and forums to traditional business applications can really give your team a new dimension in communications. This is valid for companies with a single office but more so when you have a large company collaborating between countries and continents. The marketing people are calling this the Enterprise 2.0 revolution.
One platform: wide range of solutions
Digital asset management
Many content management providers consider digital asset management to be out of scope. To us rich media is just another content type. You apply the same content management principles to video asset an image or a Word document as we use for text. In addition we have this powerful transformation engine which converts your high resolution files to one or more derived files for publishing online. We can turn your production quality video into a compressed Adobe Flash file similar to the ones used by YouTube. We do the same for high resolution photographs and images. You just provide the best asset available and let Unify take care of creating the appropriate files.
Intranets
Portals are ideal for intranets. Single sign-on for all your employees and a dynamic environment for online collaboration. Our standards based platform provides great value with out of the box functionality and the means for you to expand it by integrating with 3rd party applications. For more information we recomend the Lowe case study.
Print workflow
We have been doing quite a lot of work with publishing clients where the focus is moving towards online delivery of content. The main trend here is that the ownership of content is changing and moving towards a central repository where you write once and publish in multiple channels rather than creating content for print and then repurposing for web. There are more detailed information to be found in the Virgin Holidays case study.
Product management
For many companies the product catalog is the heart of the business. Managing copy, images, documents and FAQ can quickly turn into a nightmare if you store and mange the content in multiple repositories and applications. We have successfully implemented Product management solutions for Woolworths and Siminn (Iceland Telecom)