Modernizing IBM Product Master: 5 ways to accelerate business value creation

As lockdowns cascaded around the globe due to the coronavirus pandemic, consumers were forced to go online to purchase everything from groceries and prescriptions to furniture and vehicles.

1. As a result, e-commerce companies have compressed a decade of market share growth into a little more than a year, with global e-commerce sales growing 42% in 2020, according to Adobe’s Digital Economy Index report.

The pandemic also disrupted every aspect of society that relies on interpersonal communications, from engineering and manufacturing to banking and healthcare. Though these are disparate industries, they have one thing in common: each depends on the efficient development and rollout of products, whether the product is a complex aircraft or a life insurance policy.

Digital product information management for a digital economy

Once the pandemic subsides, there’s every indication that the digital habits we’ve embraced over the last year or more will continue after restrictions are lifted.

Organizations that have digitally transformed their businesses will be uniquely poised to deliver truly omnichannel experiences with the speed and efficiency consumers demand—and boost their customer loyalty, market share, and bottom lines in the process.

The heart of any product-driven organization that relies on distribution partners to fulfill sales is the product information management system, or PIM. PIM’s aggregate, manage, and syndicate all the product data required to market and sell products through third parties, making them an essential part of any organization’s digital transformation efforts.

Modernizing a market leader

IBM’s Product Master® has been a market-leading PIM solution since the category began, dating back to when it was known as IBM InfoSphere® Master Data Management Collaborative Edition.

Persistent Systems has fully modernized the platform, breaking it down into microservices which are then containerized using RedHat® OpenShift®. This modernization effort has optimized IBM Product Master for the needs of today’s digital leaders in three ways:

1. Faster launches and improvements: New instances are created in minutes with a few clicks of a mouse, so new users can begin reaping the benefits of their investment right away. New features, functions, and improvements are made continually, rather than through infrequent X.X release candidates.
2. Scalability: Users can instantly scale up and down as their needs change, automatically. When the load rate increases, the platform automatically spawns another container, and that whole load gets processed as the customer requires without any dropoff in performance or customer intervention.
3. Multi-cloud ready: By relying on OpenShift for containerization and orchestration, IBM Product Master is not only cloud-ready—it’s cloud-native. Users can deploy on (or integrate with) AWS, Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, and other leading cloud providers with all the necessary efficiency, robustness, flexibility, and security modern architectures demand.

Five ways IBM Product Master is accelerating business value creation

Organizations that rely on IBM Product Master are accelerating their business value creation efforts in several critical ways, including:

1. Faster, better product launches: IBM Product Master’s cloud-native nature allows it to extract the full benefits of hybrid cloud platforms, enhanced with cloud-based ML and AI capabilities. These algorithms continuously sweep product content and automatically correct or flag typos, inconsistencies, or anything that looks inconsistent with similar products and categories.
2. Better data-driven decision making: IBM Product Master comes complete with intuitive dashboards for various roles and responsibilities, tapping the power of the cloud to deliver clear, correct, complete, and current information on demand using data visualizations that make it easy for users to understand and act with confidence.
3. Richer employee and customer experiences: With AI-based chatbots built in to provide immediate assistance, IBM Product Master can help users find exactly what they’re looking for quickly and naturally. From a digital asset management perspective, IBM Product Master can accelerate the information ingestion process by identifying the assets, categorizing them, and associating them with the correct product information automatically.
4. Robust, secure supplier portals: Data breaches that rely on third-party credentials to provide easier access to critical data and systems are. IBM Product Master’s supplier portal has a robust set of security features and controls that limits supplier access solely to the products they are supplying. This functionality is supported by a supplier dashboard that logs every supplier interaction, allowing users to see exactly who is modifying what product data, when, and from where.
5. Tighter, faster integration: APIs are the connective tissue of the digital ecosystem. IBM Product Master has supported a library of more than a thousand Java APIs for many years. To ensure users can take full advantage of today’s API standards, Persistent developers added more than 200 Ref services as well, enhancing the platform’s technology independence. API calls can now be made from any platform or language of the user’s choice, ensuring an optimized, robust, and modern integration with other platforms and systems.

Find out how IBM Product Master can help your organization boost customer loyalty, grow your market share and improve your bottom line in an increasingly digital environment, click here to find out more.

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