With release 10 of "MDM - Product 360", Informatica introduces several innovations focused on efficiency and user experience
Our consulting colleagues took a close look at the new release, which, according to Informatica, focuses completely on the user. A substantial part of the new functions are intended to improve efficiency and user experience. This should result in significant time and cost savings and improvements to make the software easier and more flexible to use.
Important innovations at a glance:
User Experience
- Product relationships are visualized in 360-degree overview
- The assortment management in the Web UI allows business users more self-service
Increased efficiency
- Managing preset values for product attributes in the Web UI
- Processes for exports, dashboards and data quality rules have been accelerated significantly
Visual illustration of product relationships and simplified assortment management
The human brain can more easily consume and relate images than text. One of the highlights is the presentation of product relationships as a graph. Users now have the option to visualize their products to be managed within the context of their relationship (see Figure 1).
This allows the user, in most cases persons maintaining data, an improved overview of the completeness and quality of their product information. Especially the product relationships required in e-commerce, such as product articles, kits and also bundles, can be optimized in this way. Even errors that are often found in web shops, such as wrong references and unsuitable spare parts, can be found and corrected faster by visualization than is possible with the usual text comparisons or in tables.
Figure 1: Visualization of product relationships
More self-service on assortments for business units and users
With the new release, users have the possibility to manage all relevant data objects such as articles, variants and products via a new, optimized Web UI for the first time. According to our consulting team, this represents a significant improvement in usability. Before release 10, users still had to request certain changes from administrators. Now they have - appropriate application rights required - the possibility to define and change assortments by themselves. While this increases the user experience, it also significantly simplifies and accelerates the administration and maintenance process.
Faster processes save time and money
A core task of PIM systems is to provide optimal product data for e-commerce. A situation that everyone has already experienced: Within a product group, an online shop displays product characteristics (e.g. color, size) that are not comparable. Or even undeniably identical products in the shop have different values and descriptions, thus creating uncertainty among consumers. Considering the vendor perspective, inconsistent attributes also lead to major problems: For example, it can happen that a retailer maintains T-shirts of different brands in his system that have one and the same colour, but the description by light blue and sky blue suggests a difference.
Preset values, which are maintained centrally and for which there are responsibilities in the form of data stewards defined by data governance, now prevent exactly these errors in the maintenance and creation of product information. With this feature, Informatica's new release simplifies internal reporting on data quality. For the customer, this enhances the user experience and speeds up product launches.
For us, with release 10, Informatica has delivered some innovations that can truly improve the maintenance process. The topic of process acceleration was applied in three areas at once, thus increasing efficiency for the users.
Users benefit from this innovation in the following areas, in particular
- Export of reports, which now run much faster to create result
- Dashboard loading, data is now loaded asynchronously, and key figures and evaluations are visible faster
- Checking of data quality rules, these now run in the background and do not affect the simultaneous work in the system
Discover the delta to your current PIM with a PIM Health Check
The dynamic evolution of the software market in the context of digitalisation also makes it necessary to regularly review in-house system landscapes. Is the current infrastructure still in line with the market? Are there processes that should be checked for up-to-dateness and performance? A PIM Health Check helps to ask exactly these questions and to put the PIM to the test. Get more information here: PIM Health Check