Customers expect more than just quality—they’re looking for effortless, personalised shopping experiences. To keep up, automotive businesses need more than great service and clever marketing—they need top-notch product information.
Product Information Management (PIM) solutions are the cornerstone of customer experience. The way businesses organise, update, and deliver product information redefines the customer experience, helping build trust and loyalty.
One of our automotive industry customers struggled with outdated, fragmented legacy systems and manual processes, which made managing product data both time-consuming and inefficient.
They turned to Bluestone PIM with a clear goal: to centralise, automate, and integrate their data. By doing so, they aimed to boost operational efficiency, deliver exceptional customer experiences, and set the foundation for scalable growth.
Here’s what they have achieved with a leading composable PIM:
How an Automotive Company Leveraged Product Data to Create Better Customer Experiences
A manufacturer and distributor of automotive parts is modernising its infrastructure by transitioning from outdated in-house systems to an advanced PIM system.
By adopting MACH architecture in PIM, the company is building a modular, scalable, and future-ready infrastructure.
Automotive Company Business Problems
The automotive customer’s key business problems can be summarised as:
- Outdated systems: The customer relies on multiple legacy systems that are not well-suited for the modern e-commerce needs, leading to inefficiencies, difficulties with data synchronisation, and redundant data handling.
- Data integration challenges: The customer’s setup lacks seamless integration among critical systems. This limits the ability to update product data efficiently and keep all systems synchronised.
- Dependency on manual processes: Current operations rely on time-consuming manual processes, increasing the risk of error and limiting scalability as the product catalogue grows.
- Complex product data requirements: The customer’s product catalogue requires detailed, accurate, and well-organised data. Managing this data across multiple disconnected systems hinders consistency and efficiency.
- Lack of flexibility in existing data models: The customer needs a flexible data model to manage diverse product types and custom attributes effectively, which the legacy systems cannot support.
PIM for Automotive Industry: Bluestone PIM Solution
To solve the business problems, the customer plans to leverage Bluestone PIM to centralise its product data.
This centralisation of data enables better management of the product catalogue, greater operational efficiency and streamlined processes. With its advanced data modelling capabilities, Bluestone PIM can handle product variants, custom attributes, and intricate relationships between products more effectively.
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Data Modelling & Governance
Explore the power of APIs and easy-to-use graphic interface to model your product data effectively.
Also, Bluestone PIM’s composable architecture supports seamless integration with the customer’s existing systems and new modern solutions. These integrations will allow for faster updates and real-time synchronisation.
Expected Business Outcomes for the Automotive Industry
By implementing a composable PIM, such as Bluestone PIM, the automotive customer can experience:
- Improved operational efficiency: By streamlining data management processes and reducing manual efforts, Bluestone PIM enables agile and efficient workflows.
- Data consistency and accuracy: With a single source of truth of all product data and an API-only architecture, the customer can maintain consistent, high-quality data across all systems.
- Faster time-to-market: By optimising data handling and integrating Bluestone PIM with the e-commerce platform and other systems, the customer can deliver product updates and launch new products faster.
- Scalability & future growth: Bluestone PIM scalable architecture supports expansions without major adjustments to the data infrastructure, easily accommodating new regions, product lines, or customer segments.
- Enhanced customer experience: With consistent, accurate and comprehensive product information across all touchpoints, the customer can deliver a good shopping experience, improving customer satisfaction and trust.
Agile Data in Automotive Business Transformation
Following our customer’s journey, here is how important smart product data is to transform automotive businesses, with a special focus on how PIM solutions drive this transformation:
1. Data Accuracy & Digital Assets
To deliver a positive shopping experience, websites must offer clear, detailed descriptions and up-to-date product images. This makes data management essential.
For example, Bluestone PIM ensures precise vehicle catalogue management, allowing businesses to centralise important specifications such as engine type, dimensions and emission values, while the integrated digital asset management (DAM) links high-resolution images and videos to the right products.
In addition, Bluestone PIM ensures the correct management of parts and accessories by enabling businesses to link spare parts to compatible vehicles, include detailed descriptions and take regional differences into account.
Bluestone PIM also enables the management of historical data and ensures that the archives of older vehicles and parts are preserved so that service and repair work can be carried out.
Accurate and complete data isn’t just a nice-to-have—it’s a critical factor for business success. When customers have the information they need to make confident purchasing decisions, it enhances their shopping experience, builds trust, and strengthens loyalty.
2. Consistent Product Experience Across All Touchpoints
Customers expect a seamless experience, whether they're browsing a website, scrolling through social media, or shopping in-store.
Modern PIM solutions such as Bluestone PIM play a vital role in maintaining consistency. By centralising product data, they ensure that the information is always accurate and up-to-date across all channels. This not only minimises errors but also enhances the overall customer experience, building trust and satisfaction. With multi-channel publishing, businesses can ensure consistent product information across OEM websites, marketplaces, and catalogues. Automating updates within PIM helps businesses maintain accuracy, avoiding discrepancies across platforms.
3. Agility to Meet Market Demands
Agility is not just about speed - it’s about staying competitive. Businesses need to update their product information quickly, launch new products and respond to market trends. A PIM solution enables businesses to achieve this agility, especially composable PIMs that are built on a Microservice-based, API-first, Cloud-native, Headless (MACH) architecture.
Bluestone PIM ensures that product data can be integrated into other systems and updated quickly. Composable architecture makes it easier for businesses to adapt to customer needs, bring products to market faster, and stay ahead of the competition.
By enabling custom-made integrations with industry standards and third-party systems, such as ACES and PIES or ERP and CRM platforms, Bluestone PIM promotes harmonious collaboration.
Furthermore, with automated workflows, optimised processes and accurate, real-time synchronisation of product information, automotive businesses leveraging a composable architecture can respond quickly to market demands and significantly accelerate time-to-market.
4. Personalised Customer Experience
Smart product data enables automotive businesses to personalise the customer experience. Detailed and organised data allows recommendations, offers or content to be tailored to individual preferences. Personalisation is important as customers are more willing to engage with brands that appeal to them. PIM solutions are key to enabling this level of personalisation.
Centralising and organising comprehensive automotive product data through a Product Information Management system simplifies matching products to customers and delivers tailored recommendations.
By connecting Bluestone PIM with the right front-end solution, businesses can improve search and fitment optimisation. Enriched product data, powered by features like AI Enrich, ensures customers can easily find the right products with accurate and contextualised information.
Modern PIM solutions, such as Bluestone PIM, incorporate built-in AI features that enable businesses to offer hyper-personalised customer experiences.
5. Supporting Future Growth
Expanding into new markets, growing the product portfolio or tapping into new customer segments can overwhelm outdated systems. That's why automotive businesses need a composable PIM that can grow with them.
A strong, flexible and scalable solution ensures that businesses can maintain the efficiency and accuracy of their product information without jeopardising their growth. This future-proof architecture not only supports growth, but also ensures that the customer experience is not compromised.
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The Complete Guide to PIM
‘Complete Guide to PIM’ covers the foundations of Product Information Management.
The Growing Power of E-commerce in the Automotive industry
E-commerce is transforming how automotive businesses operate and interact with their customers. Many manufacturers that traditionally focused on business-to-business (B2B) transactions are now embracing direct-to-consumer (B2C) strategies to meet the increasing demand for online purchases of automotive parts and accessories.
This shift highlights a significant change in how customers search for and buy products.
Digital catalogues are essential for helping customers find parts compatible with their vehicles. Their effectiveness relies on smart product data that is accurate, flexible, and scalable to meet growing catalogues and shifting customer demands.
Composable PIM solutions drive this transformation by streamlining complex product data management, ensuring consistency across platforms, and providing the agility needed to stay competitive in a fast-evolving market.
The Takeaway: It’s About More Than Data
Data-driven agility isn’t just about technology - it’s about people. By investing in smarter, more customer-focused ways of managing product information, automotive businesses can deliver engaging personalised experiences while staying agile in the market.
Clear, accessible, and consistent product information is the foundation for customer loyalty and business success.
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ROI of PIM:
Reduce costs, accelerate time to market, and maximize revenue
