A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Omni-Channel architecture, as presented by Anoop Kulshreshtha of Vitamin Shoppe, along with my own thoughts on the topic. He had more elements of an omni-channel architecture than I could fit in one article and do it justice, so this week, I give you part 2 of what is shaping up to be a 3-part series.

To recap briefly, the elements I covered earlier were a single view of the customer and order management. This week, I’ll take a look at two more — product information management (PIM), and enterprise content and digital asset management (DAM).

Product Information Management (PIM)

In my last article on this topic, I compared customer information to PIM, drawing out that customer information has all of the same challenges as PIM but with even more intricacies, like understanding households and how multiple households might exist at one address. But PIM, even though it’s been around a lot longer, is still no easy thing, and just as subject to omni-channel transformation.

According to Kulshreshtha, the problem with PIM still lies in a very old-school issue: the process around getting product information into the system accurately and quickly. In other words, a data entry kind of issue. There are definitely still problems with that, but the exposure to those problems has also increased significantly. For example, I recently bought an area rug from an online retailer that I am sure just took a wholesale feed of a supplier’s catalog, and the information about the rug I was interested in just happened to be incorrect. The end result was that it probably cost the retailer at least $50 in shipping on a $150 rug order, because I had to send it back not once, not twice, but three times before we both figured out what was going wrong. And then I watched it take the retailer three weeks before I saw the correction filter through to the site.

And PIM means so much more than descriptions and attributes. It includes rating and reviews, demo videos, manufacturer notes, curator comments, alternate hierarchies or attributes for product merchandising (which may be completely different from online merchandising), and of course, images — some of which may be generated by the supplier, the retailer, or even customers themselves. PIM in the traditional sense is wholly inadequate to this new kind of requirement.

Digital Asset Management (DAM)

Which takes us straight into the next topic — digital asset management. Kulshreshtha was blunt: he said that DAM can be handled through an enterprise service bus, but it’s really hard to do and retailers should just get a third party to do it instead.

For my part, I see retailers grappling with this to varying degrees. I think the more visual, brand-y oriented retailers are finding themselves on the front line of this struggle, but that the challenge will ultimately find its way to every retailer. The challenge itself is pretty basic: if you go through the effort of creating content, which usually is pretty expensive, then you want to make sure that you can leverage that content however you may ultimately want to use it. Once upon time, that meant that when you created a TV ad, you maybe thought it would make sense to use these actors in the photo shoot too, so that our magazine ads tie in with what people see on TV. Those simple days are long gone.

Now, considerations include in-store video, on-site video, longer-form content for YouTube, product demo content for the eCommerce site, mobile and online advertising, in-store print, direct mail and catalog, email, Pinterest, and Facebook — and I’m sure I didn’t get all of them. Each of these mediums has vastly different requirements for size, resolution, color, sound, video vs. stills, etc. The default response is to try to get as much creative done in one sitting as you can (which makes sense from an expense perspective), and then store it all in the highest resolution and size that you’ve got. If someone needs an image from the print catalog in order to display it on mobile, then theoretically you’re just sort of downsizing it to make it available. Problem is — you need to do that, and keep that, for all the creative all the time. So you’re not just storing one file at its highest resolution. You need every format for every medium — and that gets expensive and unwieldy fast.

With DAM, the area where I see people getting stuck is when mobile in particular comes into play. Most retailers seemed to manage well enough when they had to transition from print to online. But when you throw in the multitudes of devices and the need to keep images as light as possible to aid download times, mobile just got to be the straw that broke the camel’s back — that’s when retailers threw their hands up and said, I need some kind of DAM.

To top it off, I would argue that retailers still aren’t thinking comprehensively enough about DAM and cross-channel. I focused on digital asset management in this section primarily because DAM is easy to type. But don’t forget that what I’m really talking about is enterprise content management. And all of that unstructured data that now goes along with product and customer data — reviews and ratings, customer videos and images, notes from customer service reps or tweets or Facebook posts — that all counts under the DAM umbrella too. Retailers aren’t doing enough to manage these assets, and as a result, they certainly are not doing enough to leverage them either.

Four Down, Two to Go

So that’s two more off the omni-channel architecture list. I’ll bring you the last two on the list next time, along with the bonus missing element I originally promised. So stay tuned!