I have been working in the lighting industry for more than 18 years (and counting). I have taken different roles such as magazine publisher, event organiser, distributor / representative and finally a consultant.
Main problem that I have seen so far with the lighting industry is the lack of updated-technical-information. For a manufacturer, updating the catalogue is often a major event for the marketing teams (mainly for the whole company as it involves many departments). Or, keeping the web site up-to-date is accepted as a time consuming and very expensive activity as well. Especially, if you have many products and want to go with multi-language.
Some of those arguments are true for similar industries, where technical documentation is critical, like Building Materials or Chemical but in this article, I will focus on the lighting manufacturers (where my expertise is) and I will lay out 3 main reasons why, as a lighting manufacturer, you need a PIM (Product Information Management) system in order to stay competitive in today’s fast-changing environment.
1- Technical documentation
If you check PIM (Product Information Management) market today, you often see a big push over multi-channel marketing and e-commerce capabilities. (Mainly B2C approaches.)
But as a consultant, my experience with PIM so far has been on the B2B part and PIM was often the main problem solving mechanism for the technical documentation.
Too many files
Customers expect detailed and accurate product information. Each Product in the lighting industry (or even each Variant) requires many different files to be generated or shared.
Let’s see an important player’s product page:
https://www.erco.com/en/?specsheet=A4000689
13 different files to download! These needs to be generated as well, manually or automatically. PIM can also help to do that. Of course, not out of the box, but combining with proper coding, it’s very easy to automate some of the file generations.
Too many details
Same goes with product details, let’s check same player’s page:
26 data points to handle!
With thousands of products, it becomes - very quickly - an impossible job to handle.
Excel files, shared folders can only take you to a certain level with basic details, beyond that, a PIM system is an essential tool.
2- Multi-version & Multi-language
Multi-version
To make things more difficult, you need to take into account that each product will have small differences depending on the market, like for US, Input Voltage will be 120-277V whereas for the rest of the world, you will end up with 220-240V version.
Some components like Driver, Power Supply or Accessories will be different as well which will effect the marketing details of that specific product for this specific market.
Multi-language
We live in a super-connected world where global markets are easy to reach if you have the capacity and the talent. So technical documentation, depending on your target markets, will need to be multi-language as well.
Imagine all of those documents, versions and data points to be prepared / generated in not only one but two or (like one of my clients) 13 languages?
What a nightmare!
I would argue that especially for data points, if you work carefully on the data structure planning, you can work it out to have less translations for technical things. But again, this doesn’t change the fact that you still need a PIM system but having a good & experienced consultant (like me) might help more to deal with the problem in an efficient way.
FREE HINT: Keep things to be translated on the higher level of the data hierarchy (Like Family and Product) and the technical data points with universal outputs (no translation needed) can stay on low levels. (like Variant).
3- Changing components and requirements
Changing components
In a standard lighting product (luminaire or fixture as you might call), there are several critical components which defines the performance like LED Chip, Reflector / Lens, Driver, Connector, Cable etc.
And those components, especially after the invention of LED, became a regularly changing items. 2 examples might be: LED chips getting efficiency upgrade every 6 months or drivers being discontinued regularly.
So changing those will change the technical documentation for all the related products on every version and every language!
Changing requirements
This doesn’t stop only with components. There are new data requirements coming up regularly as well. Less than the component maybe, but still, you might need to add a new data point to any of the level in any time.
Like a WELL standard which will require to declare the Flicker of your products: https://www.wellcertified.com/
Or recently, Environmental Product Declaration is becoming a must have document and without a PIM and a very detailed component hierarchy, it’s impossible to prepare.
Conclusion
Being a lighting manufacturer is not easy these days. Especially, with the invention of LED, there are new players joining regularly, like the California gold rush (1848–1855). Profit margins are getting lower constantly. Any new high-technology product are becoming a commodity very quickly.
In order to fight this, your time to market is more critical than ever. As I tried to explain in this article, without a PIM system, it’s nearly impossible to manage it properly.
If you are still dealing with Excel’s and shared folders, please reach out to us so that we show you how life could have been. Believe me, once you see this side of the world, there is no going back.
Emre Güneş
- Who am I? Please see: https://agustos.com/en/who-are-we
- What I do as a PIM consultant? Please see: https://agustos.com/en/consultancy/product-information-management-pim-consultancy-sales-layer-turkey