The process of preparing, customizing, validating, and exporting your product catalogs to all of your sales channels is essential to get right. Each recipient has its own requirements, and the demands placed by your trade partners, distributors, and wholesalers can be daunting.
Effective product content syndication setup can improve the quality and accuracy of the product data you provide to these external parties, eliminate the need for back-and-forth discussions, and speed up time to market for new and updated products. Ultimately, this brings a positive impact on revenue for every organization involved.
As business is increasingly done online, the demand for industrial product content is higher than ever. Let’s take a look at how modern approaches to syndication came about, and what they can do for your business.
How did product content syndication look in the past?
Traditional methods of product content syndication were unable to support the complexity of today’s trade landscape.
Product data exports used to be managed via a combination of PIM tools, IT departments, highly technical tools, and a great deal of manual labor. All of this meant slow turnaround, a lack of agility, difficulty in creating new exports or variants, and large and unpredictable IT project fees. Product data became the bottleneck to new market entry, and there was friction between the teams that need data exports and the teams that produce them.
This was all undesirable when you consider that it’s no longer enough to sell through only five large distributors. The trade landscape is getting more and more complex, and the route to market is more omnichannel. Manufacturers need to manage relationships with increasing numbers of digital channels, and deliver product data - quickly, accurately, and in a way that’s compliant with their unique, and changeable, specifications.
Legacy systems and resources simply can’t keep up with today’s level of demand or the variety in expectations. Teams that need data exports require an agility that cannot be met by PIM specialists, informaticians, and designers using highly technical tools.
With digital transformation projects underway for many industrial manufacturers, it’s time to bring product content syndication methods in line with Industry 4.0 as well. Modern product syndication has a simple objective: to make the process faster, easier, and more forgiving to constant change.
What does modern product content syndication look like?
Next-generation product content syndication platforms are the answer to the digitization of information and order flows and the adoption of ecommerce for industrial products. In short, they help manufacturers succeed as Industry 4.0 takes over.
With increasingly complex expectations from product data, including specific formats and requirements from the different types of data export, there’s a strong need for new platforms and new possibilities.
Modern product content syndication solutions automate the generation of a whole range of data export configurations. They help to meet your channels’ high demands for format and quality, by allowing you to adapt your data to various industry standards, among other capabilities. And most importantly of all, they are extremely agile, delivering results within hours rather than weeks.
The knock-on benefits of modern platforms include fast turnaround times, the ability to take advantage of new market opportunities right away, more predictable costs, and clear ROI.
To learn more about modern product content syndication and how to take your product data exports to the next level, download our guide, Product content syndication for Industry 4.0.