Product Data Management: An Innovative Solution to Your Product Needs (2021)

Introduction

In an industry, a product is born, matures, and then branches off in the world, just like a human baby does. The process of managing this entire lifecycle of the product from its creation, through engineering design and manufacture, to service and disposal of manufactured products, is known as Product lifecycle management. The inspiration for this business practice emerged out of American Motor Corporation when the manufacturer was looking for ways to increase the speed of the cycle. Product data management is a function within product lifecycle management.

1. What is Product Data Management?
2. Advantages of Product Data Management
3. Capabilities of Product Data Management
4. What Product Data Management Software is Available?
5. What are the Product Data Management Tools?

1. What is Product Data Management?

PDM stands for product data management. During the manufacturing of a product, product data management is the business function that is responsible for the management and publication of product data. Data product management is the use of computer software or any other tools to control and track any data related to the product. This data that is tracked mainly consists of:

• Technical specification of the products
• Specifications for the manufacture of products
• Types of material required
• Capital required
• Costs associated with creation and launch
• Change and archive of all information related to a product

2. Advantages of Product Data Management

If you a merchant and you aren’t using a product data management tool, you are missing out on a big way to what you can achieve through data product management tools. This is because using a product data management tool you can increase the potential of your product by keeping your product data consistent in real-time and reducing the enormous workload of employees by optimizing front and back end data and simultaneously enables your product catalog to grow while managing suppliers and satisfaction. Moreover, these are some benefits of using a product data management tool :

• A PDM tool helps you to find and characterize the data quickly. Because of the data being stored centrally, tracking and controlling becomes comparatively easy.
• PDM design helps you to reduce costs and exclude potential development errors.
• If an organization is set up among different places in the world, PDM tools facilitate collaboration between these global teams.
• Take multichannel listings way to a different level, a PDM tool won’t only help you in creating product listings but goes on to let you quickly and seamlessly list products per channel, maintain complete sync between different channels and warehouses, and all of this from a single, comfortable dashboard.
• Makes managing data easier as it helps creates a structure of visual management environment for the data tracked for the product.

3. Capabilities of Product Data Management

Ever since software has been used to structure and analyze data, the capabilities of data management have grown exponentially. Product data management tools have enormous capabilities in terms of the inception of the product through the manufacturing processes to the shopping experience of customers.

The capabilities of product data management are endless, yet some of them are listed below :

• Helps you create better design, reduce errors, and build more efficient development cycles.
• CAD file management, a PDM tool helps you take direct control of all valuable designs and iterations and maintain and keep them in sync in real-time.
• You don’t have to worry about saving and sorting data after every time you make a change or start something from scratch, product data management tools help you automatically save the revision history on data as you work.
• A PDM tool enables you to integrate visual design with business systems like MRPs and ERPs.
• Increases the security of the product data and prevent premature leaks by centrally storing the data and granting control to the accessibility of permissions for version control and retrieval.

4. What Product Data Management Software is Available?

There is a lot of product data management software that comes with various features and one can select a data product management tool based upon his/her preferences, product costs, and basic requirements. A few of the leading software in product data management with their key features are :

• PDXpert PLM: PDXpert engineering data management software is simple to use, flexible to apply, and improves the accessibility and security of your design, production, quality, and support data. Extensive file revision & document control; part & supplier management; bill of material (BOM) management; engineering change management (ECN); approval workflow; free-form text search; multi-user access; and data export.
• Delogue PLM: A simple and easy cloud-based product data management tool made for fashion and lifestyle companies. It is a collaborative PDM tool that includes planning, buying, design, manufacture, marketing, and financing of a product. Delogue eases product development and makes processes more efficient.
• Sales layer: Sales Layer is SaaS bases product data management tool that is an agile solution along with the fastest implementation in the industry. Sales Layer fixes problems with the complexity of the product, catalog version control, information fields, and the entire flow of the data supply chain. Sales Layers makes a cloud database of shareable, manageable catalog data with the utmost security.
• SolidWorks Enterprise PDM: Cloud-based solution designed to help businesses manage product data, share design information, automate workflows & monitor progress.
• Ataccama: The best PDM in the market by the majority of reviews of ease and comfort while using the software. Provides unmatched quality, quick data management, and security.

5. What are the Product Data Management Tools?

There is a plenty of product data management software. This software basically varies from what services and tools they provide. There are essentially five types of data management tools :

• Cloud data management: PDM tools that do the process of integrating information from a company’s ecosystem of cloud-based applications.
• ETL and data integration: Tools that help in loading information from data sources into a database, editing, summarizing, and aggregating them into a suitable format for analysis.
• Master data management: A product data management tool that helps in managing the essential organization’s data, client accounts, and business transactions.
• Reference data management: A tool used to define the permissible values which can be utilized by other information fields like a list of countries and places, postal codes, or product serial numbers.
• Data analytics and visualization: Data product management tool that involves the processing of specific data from big information sources and databases, performing data analytics, and allowing users to dice, slice, and present visual designs and dashboards.

Conclusion

If you are a start-up, merchant, vendor, or anyone who has to deal with the creation of products and production processes, product data management is something very essential to the growth of your company. A PDM tool or software helps you to grow your business to exorbitant scales and help you manage the data and process automatically simultaneously. So if you are yet to integrate a PDM tool in the production, management, or marketing of your product, it is the first and the best step in order to take more control of the statistics and growth of your product.

Interested to learn all about Product Management from the best minds in the industry? Check out our Product Management Course. This 6-month-long program takes place online through live instructor-led sessions. It is the only program in India that offers the ‘Bring Your Own Product (BYOP)’ feature so that learners can build their product idea into a full-blown product, and go through an entire Product Development lifecycle. Not only this, but this is the only program in India with a curriculum that conforms to the 5i Framework. Post completion, learners receive a joint certification from the Indian Institute of Management, Indore, and Jigsaw Academy.