Do I need a PIM (Product Information Management) and/ or DAM (Digital Asset Management) solution? Do I need both? Can one alone solve my needs? This question is one of the many which come up since working in this industry. I decided to capture arguments and experience from DAM and PIM industry experts for your learning in this blog. The ambition is not to sell one specific tool, or judge one over the other. You have to take your decision that fits your business needs the most.
Kudos to experts like: Hootan Soheilzad from QBank, Javier Torres from Nexer Unified Commerce and Reinier Schoo from inriver, who did we webinar (video below) and Tobias Moser from Sharedien/Advellence, Nadim Wardé (advsior), who joint our linkedin discussion.
Nadim Wardé:
“1. DAM can cover corporate asset, brand identity management, …which is not the role of the PIM
2. DAM will answer some specific business cases : worldwide launch with lot of assets (pictures, videos,…) to be made easily accessible through CDN, massive publication of assets for some annual events (christmas, back to school…)
3. Management of artwork processes
As lot of PIM solution do not offer DAM capabilities or have limited DAM capabilities, we can see more and more companies having both solution coexsiting, and especially for medium to large corporation.
And on the other side, after having developed a data and content maturity with a PIM,
companies are ready for a DAM solution with larger functionalities to support and enrich their content production.
However it’s important to have the role and governance of each solution clearly defined”
Tobias Moser, Sharedien/Advellence:
“In my opinion, there are multiple reasons, the following ones are the most important ones:
1) A company has to manage also non-product related assets
2) A DAM is normally accessible by all employees in a company (content creators, consumers, download portals), whereas a PIM is mostly dedicated to content creators like product managers. Therefore a DAM is built to manage millions of assets and serve them to thousands of users
3) A DAM contains specialized workflows for asset creation & ingestion, proofing & feedback loops, digital rights management, and publication (serve them via CDN). To support creatives in their daily work, integrations into desktop applications like Adobe Creative Suite, etc. are the standard
4) A DAM is designed to store hundreds of terra bytes of data and is specialized to stream a lot of content to many users
5) A DAM knows the digital asset and is specialized in versioning binaries and transforming & transcode them in any other format to reduce manual efforts and make them accessible (dimensions, color management, 3D, etc.)
6) A DAM focuses on managing the emotions, whereas a PIM is managing the hard facts”
Conclusion:
At the end of the day you need both capabilities. To what extend, depends on the complexity of your data, content and assets.
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