Working with Pimcore for Product Information Management

Oct. 23, 2012 - PRLog -- Pimcore is the latest content and product management framework based on open source allowing smaller businesses to differentiate themselves from their peers.

Pimcore can be used in a variety of ways including as a frontend to a website, however our primary focus has been using Pimcore as a Product Information Management (PIM) or Master Data Management (MDM) tool.  These tools are normally the realm of Enterprise customers including solutions from Oracle, IBM and SAP, however in recent years Pimcore have released an open source variant in direct competition with Talend MDM.

The Pimcore solution is very easy to install working on PHP and MySQL with a very elegant frontend, however the learning curve is steep due to its use of the Zend framework and on initial investigation most tasks look to require programming, this means business owners normally require technical resource to implement the solution.  We have found that using the standard implementation without programming can be achieved to cover 95% of the PIM requirements however this requires a combination of business and technical knowledge to find the correct balance using the functionality available in Pimcore.

Our PIM requirements have been to use these tools as a backend product management solution which allows outsourcing of data entry to third parties and then feeding these normalised datasets to frontend applications such as Magento, Volusion, Drupal, Joomla, etc.  Due to the technical nature of Pimcore and normally that of the frontend eCommerce solutions, the data load applications can be complex however we have developed these to include product parent/child relationships and loading of core attributes including images, pricing, categories without any programming required in Pimcore.  This does lead to some small concessions however ultimately it allows businesses to adapt quicker to changing markets as programming resource is minimised to only minor adjustments to the data loading from Pimcore to the eCommerce application.

The advantages of using Pimcore or any PIM as a product management solution outweighs the intial costs, it allows simplified backend maintenance of products, customers, categories, master data which can then be automatically loaded to the eCommerce application in the background.  Managing these datasets within an eCommerce tool is both complex and time consuming meaning that more effort is spent data loading than marketing the business and taking customer orders.  As PIM tools allow version tracking and publishing of data, it means that data entry can be passed to much cheaper locations while quality and control is kept locally.

The PIM tools allow smaller businesses to differentiate themselves and gain the advantages of an enterprise two tiered architecture without the high costs normally associated with such tools.  This allows smaller businesses to implement a platform for growth providing customers with increased qualities of service and product information.

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