Yesterday Gautam Sood of Riversand blogged about that One Size doesn’t fit all – The Complexities of a Global PIM.
In this blog post Gautam examines the challenges, the key questions and the concept options an organization have when embarking on a journey to go from a national (or regional) scale to an international scale in Product Information Management.
A recent blog post here on the blog also had that theme for the Master Data Management (MDM) realm. This post is about Cross Border Master Data Management.
In his post Gautam states: “A Global PIM is not a consolidation exercise. Variance is the reality, and it has to be supported.”
This resonates very well with my findings. Very low practical this means that you will not win by translating all product descriptions into English. Even the metadata has to be multilingual, as you will interact with trading partners using different languages. While one public standard for product information may be king in one region, this will most likely not be the case in another region, which again effects how you collaborate with trading partners in different geographies.
In my eyes the global PIM journey does not end with consensus and a common platform of either concept inside your organization. You have to embrace your business ecosystem of trading partners. How to do that is explained in the post What a PIM-2-PIM Solution Looks Like.
Liliendahl on Data Quality 