“Black Friday & Christmas: 5 Retail Strategies for Providing a Wonderful Shopping Experience” is the title of a recent blog post by Antonia Renner on the Informatica blog.
This blog post revolves around how Master Data Management (MDM) and Product Information Management (PIM) can be the foundation of a better shopping experience and how to do this within driving digital transformation, being agile, and streamlining internal and external collaboration and workflows.
I agree with that. My only concern around the means mentioned relates to the section about how great customer experience starts with great supplier product data. The proposed approach for that is a self-service supplier data portal.
From what I have experienced, the concept of a supplier data portal for product data has limited chances of success. The problem for you as retailer or other form of downstream trading partner is your supplier. They will eventually have to deal with hundreds of supplier portals with different format and structure by the choice of their downstream trading partners, whereof you are just one. If you are a big one to them, it might work. Else probably not.
In the same way, your supplier could offer their customer data portal, build with their choice of format and structure. If they are a big one to you, you might go with that. Else, you probably would object to dealing with hundreds of different upstream data portals for you to go-to.
My Christmas present to you – suppliers, retailers, other supply chain nodes / PIM-MDM solution vendors – is a free trial / ambassadorship on Product Data Lake.
Product Data Lake is a cloud service for sharing product data in business ecosystems. Product Data Lake ensures:
- Completeness of product information by enabling trading partners to exchange product data in a uniform way
- Timeliness of product information by connecting trading partners in a process driven way
- Conformity of product information by encompassing various international standards for product information
- Consistency of product information by allowing upstream trading partners and downstream trading partners to interact with in-house structure of product information
- Accuracy of product information by ensuring transparency of product information across the supply chain
It’s in your hands. See you on Product Data Lake.
Liliendahl on Data Quality 
Hi Henrik,
Great post as always and I also liked my colleague Antonia Renner’s (who has got special skills in relating Supplier and Product MDM with festive season) article.
From my observation over last 2 years, I am seeing a need for managing Supplier data in the same system where Product and Customer data are managed. The need for this is arising because companies want to see an end-to-end flow of raw materials to finished goods, and who is buying them – all in one single place. Managing these key domains along with location and other data in a holistic way is important for sure, but managing the relationships between these domains is key as well to see the complete flow. This allows business to make right decisions based on supply and demand.
I talked about this in a bit more details in a video recently with my Garnie Bolling.
Looking to hear your view point.
Thanks for commenting Prash. I am a fan of “The Garnie Bolling Show” and good to see you as the guest star 🙂
I agree with the need of having a portal for on-boarding supplier master data.
The problem with a supplier data portal for having your suppliers on-boarding their product data into your system can be seen in the light of the term “end-to-end”. Because this actually means hundreds of ends. An end for each supplier with their structure and format of product data. Either you have to force them into your system (if you are bigger than them) – or they force you into their customer data portal (if they are bigger than you).
I am convinced, that Informatica, and not at least the clients at Informatica, will achieve a common win-win situation by joining Product Data Lake.