Gone are the days when a good product with a basic description was enough to attract customers. Today’s consumers expect comprehensive, engaging, and accurate product information across all channels. Relying on distributors, resellers, or online stores to enrich and present this data often leads to generic, inconsistent, or even misleading descriptions - harming your brand image and failing to engage your audience.
To succeed, manufacturers must equip their Sales and Marketing teams with tools as effective as those used in other departments. While systems like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) are capable of centralising product data, they lack the capabilities of a dedicated Product Information Management (PIM) system.
A PIM doesn’t just organise your product data - it enriches, manages, and ensures consistency across all your channels. And with Bluestone PIM, powered by advanced AI, managing product information and catalogues becomes even easier, faster, and more efficient.
Let’s discover how AI can reshape your approach to Product Information Management, helping you work smarter, not harder.
Key Challenges Manufacturers Encounter with Product Data
Manufacturing companies operate in a highly complex environment where the accuracy and reliability of product data play a critical role in efficiency, cost management, and overall success. However, several common challenges related to product data management often hinder their operations.
1. Handling Fragmented Product Data
Managing product data for sales and marketing is a constant struggle when information is scattered across multiple platforms, spreadsheets, and disconnected sources.
Manufacturers often struggle with:
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Inefficient and time-consuming management processes due to fragmented information.
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Inconsistencies and errors that damage brand image and customer trust.
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Challenges in keeping product information accurate and up-to-date across all channels.
2. Navigating Complex Product Variants
Manufacturers dealing with customisable or highly complex products face significant challenges in managing multiple product configurations:
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The number of possible product configurations can quickly become overwhelming, making managing all variations difficult.
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Ensuring consistent and enriched product communication by maintaining coherence in descriptions, features, and specifications across sales, marketing, and multiple customer touchpoints.
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3. Ensuring Localisation for Global Supply Chains
Operating in global markets demands that manufacturers tailor their product data to different languages and regional standards. This often leads to challenges such as:
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Ensuring consistent terminology, tone, and branding across multiple languages and cultures while adapting content to meet regional preferences and norms.
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Translating large amounts of technical data, product descriptions, and user manuals for diverse product lines can become overwhelming without centralised management of product information.
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Translation projects, especially for complex supply chains, can be time-consuming and costly, putting pressure on budgets and timelines.
4. Managing Supply Chain Complexity
Modern manufacturing often relies on extensive supply chains that require accurate data for seamless coordination. Challenges include:
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Consolidating and managing data from multiple suppliers with varying data formats and standards.
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Ensuring accurate and real-time data across the supply chain for tracking inventory, orders, and deliveries.
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Identifying and addressing risks related to incorrect or incomplete supplier data.
5. Distributing Data to Different Sales Channels
Delivering accurate and consistent product information across numerous sales channels is a difficult issue for manufacturers in today's omnichannel environment. Every outlet, whether they are traditional brick-and-mortar stores or online marketplaces, has different needs, which makes managing information more difficult. Manufacturers frequently face challenges with:
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Handling both online and brick-and-mortar store requirements, each with unique data formats and standards.
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Managing the complexity of coordinating consistent product information across multiple platforms.
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Risking inconsistencies and errors that can confuse customers and damage brand reputation.
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Increased time and resource demands to manually adapt and update data for various outlets.
How AI in PIM Can Help With These Challenges
AI is transforming PIM for manufacturers, making it easier to handle complex tasks like ensuring data accuracy, streamlining localisation, and managing product configurations.
Watch a video to learn about AI features in PIM:
By automating data quality checks and reducing manual errors, AI features help keep crucial information accurate and consistent.
Let’s take a closer look at the AI-powered features of Bluestone PIM and see how they simplify and improve the way you manage product information.
AI Enrich Enhancing Product Data Optimisation
AI Enrich is a game-changing feature that automates and optimises product data enrichment, making it an invaluable asset for manufacturers working with extensive catalogues or complex product variants.
Automated product description generation
AI Enrich automatically generates accurate and tailored product descriptions by analysing product labels, specifications, and key attributes.
This saves significant time and effort by eliminating the need for manual writing tasks, ensuring that descriptions are consistently aligned with brand guidelines and product details.
Key details extracted from images
With its image recognition capabilities, AI Enrich can extract critical visual attributes such as size, colour, shape, and material directly from product images. This enriches product data by adding those details, ensuring that product documentation and technical specifications are complete.
This functionality is particularly beneficial when dealing with large volumes of product variants or when updating catalogues with new product images.
Customised content for unique workflows
Every manufacturer has its processes, standards, and workflows, especially when it comes to handling different product categories or managing complex data sets.
AI Enrich allows users to set custom guidelines and instructions, adapting the tool to fit their specific needs.
This flexibility ensures that the content created is in line with internal standards, whether for technical information, marketing content, or customer-facing materials.
Explore how one of our customers leverages AI Enrichment to optimise and streamline their operations.
AI Linguist Simplifying Global Localisation
AI Linguist helps manufacturers overcome one of the biggest hurdles in today’s global market: the need for accurate and culturally appropriate product information localisation. Whether selling in one region or managing a worldwide operation, AI Linguist ensures your product data is always relevant and compliant with local standards.
Accurate, culturally adapted translations
AI Linguist translates product information into multiple languages while ensuring that the context, meaning, and technical details remain intact.
Unlike traditional translation tools that may miss nuances, AI Linguist is specifically trained to handle industry-specific terminology, ensuring that all technical descriptions, specifications, and user manuals are accurate and easy to understand in any language.
Technical and marketing content improved for consistency
AI Linguist doesn’t just translate text, it also refines and improves it.
Using AI Linguist ensures the language is clear, professional, and consistent across all channels. It automatically adjusts tone and style to match your brand’s voice.
AI Analyst Ensuring Data Accuracy and Quality at Scale
AI Analyst takes product data management to the next level by offering advanced analytics and insights into the quality and accuracy of your product information.
This feature is particularly helpful for manufacturers managing large product catalogues with numerous SKUs, variants, and complex technical data.
Automated product data quality checks
AI Analyst monitors and evaluates product data against predefined “golden standards” set by the manufacturer. These standards represent products deemed to exemplify high-quality product data, serving as benchmarks for analysis. To ensure accurate evaluation, up to 10 such products must be chosen from the catalog before running the analysis.
The AI-powered tool performs these checks automatically, identifying discrepancies and quality issues and eliminating the need for time-consuming manual work.
Highlighted errors
When inconsistencies or errors are detected, AI Analyst provides clear insights into the nature of the issue, whether it's a missing specification, outdated technical detail, or inconsistent product variant data.
It doesn’t just identify problems; it offers actionable recommendations on how to fix them, helping manufacturers make data-driven decisions quickly.
Real-time updates and reporting
AI Analyst integrates seamlessly with the System Monitor, providing status updates on its work progress. Through its reporting feature, manufacturers receive up-to-date insights on data quality allowing them to review suggestions provided by the AI Analyst, implement updates automatically, and maintain data integrity at scale.
Elevate Product Management with Bluestone PIM AI Features
AI-powered PIM features offer manufacturers a clear advantage. By enhancing accuracy, reducing errors, and improving the speed of operations, Bluestone PIM’s AI solutions help manufacturers keep up with market demands, reduce costs, and ultimately deliver better products faster.
Ready to take your product information management to the next level? Contact our advisors today or book a demo meeting to learn how our AI-driven PIM solution can help optimise your product data management processes and streamline your global operations.
