Somewhere hidden, at the top of a snow-covered hill, lies a tiny house. Here smoke oozes from the chimney and candles shine from the windowsill casting silhouettes in the snow outside. If you were to look through the keyhole in the front door it would probably reveal a certain white-bearded fellow, sleeping comfortably in his armchair – Santa Claus himself.
This would perhaps be the case 11 months out of the year. But, if you stepped into this tiny house in December, the situation would be quite different. Instead, Santa would be standing in the midst of the living room, giving orders to all his little elves, who are busy running to and from his workshop.
This is of course the setting of this story. The world’s largest producer and distributor of toys, and most likely the busiest place on Earth during December, where Santa and his elves are working hard to make sure that they get all the toys right for the children that they serve. Anything to delight the children and meet their expectations.
A PIM system brings order to chaos
At first glance, the workshop might appear hectic, but if you take a closer look, you’ll discover an order to this chaos. Santa has managed to obtain an up-to-date overview of all the toys’ product information - be it colors, shapes, sizes, descriptions, language translations, images and audio files - by getting his hands on a best of breed Product Information Management (PIM) system. This, we assume, must be the case, otherwise keeping track of all those wishes, and toys would be completely unrealistic.
Santa has realized how much easier things become when you have one source of truth for product information that seamlessly integrates with all critical business systems – in Santa’s case his WS System (Wishlist Scanning), CRM (Child Relationship Management),
and of course the Warehouse Management System that holds all information on what toys are in stock on the endless shelves in the underground warehouse.
While the WS system races through the wish lists all day long, the CRM system is updated in real time, providing new information and making sure that only kids with the property “nice” are added to Santa’s final list, while the ones with the property “naughty” are not. The PIM system allows Santa and his little elves to access all the updated and relevant information, thus limiting the time running around in the workshop, double-checking whether the colors or the sizes of the dolls and rocking horses are indeed correct.
When it’s finally time to load all the gifts into a bag and onto the sleigh, Santa easily prints personalized cards for the children directly from his PIM system and thereby ensures that all gifts are falling into the right chimneys.
So, thanks to Santa’s PIM system we can look forward to yet another
merry Christmas.
If you need to manage product information in your business, maybe you should look into a PIM system too. If it works for a bearded old man relying solely on elves, reindeers, and software, it might just work for you too.
Get a free live demo – Ho, Ho, Ho!
The best way to learn how a PIM system can handle product information, is by seeing it with your own eyes.
Even if you are already using a PIM system, there might be features that you are not leveraging optimally yet.
