DATA DEVELOPMENT L
aunching early this year is the NBG PIM – Product Information Management System. Originally announced at the NBG Conference in Glasgow last year, the group has taken the opportunity afforded by lockdown to refine and tweak the system. “It’s going to enable us to analyse and present pricing to our Partners in an organised structured way,” Managing Director Nick Oates says.
“This has been a very challenging project, but I think we’re now getting there. We now have a solution that we think will work and that will roll out in the New Year. Sometimes you have to go backwards to go forwards and we’ve certainly done that on this. We did a proof of concept project, and that taught us that what we wanted was much more complicated than we expected. Whilst we could come up with a simple solution, it wasn’t going to give us the whole solution that we needed.”
That is partly why the PIM has taken so much longer than initially planned, Oates says, although it was also delayed by the pandemic and the fact that it was hard to get hold of the right people at the Suppliers to provide the data that drives the system. “So, here’s one of the great ironies. People want to go online and work more digitally, but to do that we all need to have the right data, in the right format, and that’s what was hard to get hold of. If there was one thing I would say to Suppliers. It’s look at the quality of the data you give us.”
Suppliers, he says, should ask themselves a few questions about their data. “Is the information you are giving us going to help our Partners to sell your products online? Is this product description going to help the salesperson in the merchant understand what your product is? Is it going to present your product in the right way, in the best possible light? That would be a massive help to merchants and, by default, to NBG. “I think a lot of manufacturers use data that is right for their internal staff or their manufacturing side, but don’t think about how to change that to make it suitable for someone who needs to sell it. Nor, indeed, for organisations like NBG who have to try and get the data into a standard format. “The data needs to be able to tell the merchant everything they need to know about the product: how long it is, how wide it is, how many colours it comes in. Suppliers may only think about the information that they themselves need to know in order to identify that product in the factory or in
10 LOCKING DOWN THE
With more of the industry moving online during the pandemic, it’s more important than ever that Suppliers and Partners are sharing data. NBG is continuing to develop its industry-leading tools, says Managing Director Nick Oates.
DATA
the warehouse. However, if you’re making a product then you will need different information about it than if you are storing it in the warehouse or selling it onto someone else,” he says.
“Suppliers need to be able to articulate to us what the unique features are of any particular
product, the thing that will make it stand out in an online search. They may know what these features are, but do they really understand how to present it in their data so we can use it? There’s a whole education process here around compatible, useable data, so that’s why it’s been really challenging.”
January 2021
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