The Business Value Of Cross-Channel Strategic Information Management

The Business Value of Cross-channel Strategic Information Management
Managing digital and intellectual assets to improve profitability
Written by Jose Chojrin*

Advantages of Product Information Management

An enterprise systems strategy for supporting cross-functional decisions has a direct and major impact on profits. The lack of an integrated unique repository of information that can beaccessed by all of the departments and people involved in the process leads to inefficiencies and misunderstandings. This jeopardizes the overall operation, and makes it very difficult for the company to maintain a long-term competitive advantage. Furthermore, it makes life more difficult for everybody. Strategic information management enables companies to use the information proactively. In agrowing number of companies, it is becoming an indispensable tool in a hypercompetitive context. We’re in a time when the rules of commerce are shifting rapidly, and a new reality is being created almost continuously by the confluence of different approaches to commercial intelligence. Never before has it been so evident that long-term business success will no longer be predicated on the currentstrength of an organization’s balance sheet. Instead – as futurist Alvin Toffler prophesied more than 30 years ago – the winners will be those enterprises that can move quickly because they have fast access to the right information at the right time. 1 The assumption that success hinges on innovation alone is flawed. Today, it’s about better execution – about simplifying the internal processrequired to deliver products to e-commerce sites, catalogs, call centers and other sales and support channels. It’s about finding ways to eliminate the burden of time-consuming procedures, meetings and revisions that characterized the spreadsheet era. Fast access to accurate product information is critical in today’s hypercompetitive environment; companies need to be able to present the right item atthe right price at the right moment, and consumers expect to get more and better information faster. If a company can’t make its product information available when a consumer needs it, there is a high risk of losing the sale to a competitor that can. Price comparisons and purchasing decisions take an instant nowadays, and when that instant is lost, the sale is lost in most cases. StrategicInformation may be defined in different ways, but its core definition is having critical data available at exactly the right time for taking actions – actions that, if delayed, can lead to high opportunity costs and even concrete losses. However, some companies still consider strategic information management as a “nice to have” technology. That is why, in many cases, their businesses

Focused onManaging the Information Supply Chain
Focuses on managing every step of the product information supply chain and ensuring data quality, not on solving specific business problems.

Channel- and System-Neutral
Supports standard Web content management systems, custom e-commerce applications and all major enterprise systems.

Solid Data Governance
Provides the robust tool sets needed tocontinually monitor data quality and ensure compliance with corporate standards.

Stibo Systems | Executive Brief

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are affected by the actions of competitors that have understood the strategic and urgent need to have this capability in order to improve their competitive position. Without it they remain spectators at the battlefield instead of tough gladiators struggling to capture new sales attheir websites, stores and multichannels. For more than 20 years, Stibo Systems has been helping companies around the world improve profitability by better managing their non-transactional data. Nontransactional data becomes transactional when it flows through the organization. As the data is stored and evolves in different silos, it becomes error prone when it is managed by different people and...