PIM vs DAM – Know the Difference

As enterprises start catering to the increasingly varied demands of the digital age, the focus is shifting towards managing vast volumes of data and digital files. This is essential for maintaining consistent brand identity across digital and physical touchpoints while enhancing customer experience to boost sales. For most organizations, this means identifying solutions that can simplify the process of handling both product data and digital assets to realize faster time-to-market. 

This is where business leaders often get caught in a dilemma of choosing between Product Information Management (PIM) and Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems. While PIM is great at ensuring consistency and accuracy of product information across digital and physical channels, DAM is the best solution for managing digital assets, including rich media. 

Though the two systems have seemingly different strengths, there are also a few overlaps between PIM and DAM as both feed into each other’s functionality to a certain extent. Both PIM and DAM help in eliminating data silos and function as consolidated and highly accessible database. Also, DAM is often considered to be a subset of PIM. All these intricacies can make selecting the right solution a bit tricky for enterprises. 

Here we’ll highlight the distinct advantages of the two systems and help identify the best-fit solution based on specific business requirements.

A deeper look at PIM 

PIM systems deal with product information and the way it is utilized by sales and marketing departments. This can include everything from simple marketing collaterals like catalogs and specification sheets to product data on company websites and online stores. By integrating product data in one centralized system, PIM ensures that highest levels of accuracy and consistency of information are achieved and shared with potential customers. Additionally, by providing instant access to relevant product information, PIM systems also enables efficient collaboration between different teams within an organization. With worldwide online sales increasing by almost 18% every year, enterprises investing in PIM solutions gain a definite competitive edge in today’s highly crowded digital market. 

Benefits of PIM in a nutshell

• With all the product data integrated into a single platform, modifying catalogs and portfolios to adapt to market changes becomes a lot easier. PIM also enables almost real-time updates of product specifications across marketing channels.  
• A unified location storing product information is great for enhancing operational efficiency and inventory accuracy. PIM systems can easily make this happen by integrating with other business systems like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions, Order Management Systems (OMS), and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools.
• PIM enables businesses to provide consumers with high-quality product information and a seamless shopping experience across online and offline touchpoints. This enables better decision-making and vastly improves the customer journey.

An overview of DAM

With businesses becoming increasingly reliant on digital files for both internal and external communications, besides consistency, archiving and version tracking are crucial for ensuring smooth operations. And this is where Digital Asset Management excels. DAM is all about organizing and indexing digital media assets such as images, videos, presentations, documents, logos, and marketing materials. As of 2021, around 90 percent of B2B businesses have already moved to a digital-first model, and tight timelines are the norm for marketing activities. By simplifying and accelerating the process of accessing and retrieving the right digital files, DAM can help create more efficient workflows and boost productivity.

Benefits of DAM at a glance

• DAM enables easy access using search parameters like descriptions and categories by indexing and structuring digital assets with metadata. This has the potential to eliminate a significant percentage of non-productive effort hours spent seeking the correct image file or sifting through marketing presentation. 
• DAM safeguards brand integrity by limiting the number of authorized users who have control over brand assets and copyrighted material. Additionally, by creating a centralized location for all digital assets, DAM systems ensure that separate departments within an organization have access to the same files. This helps enterprises maintain a consistent brand voice and identity.
• Integrating DAM with applications like PowerPoint, Adobe InDesign, and social media can enable businesses to automate processes and optimize workflows. This frees up internal teams to focus on creativity and meaningful value additions.

How can enterprises choose the right solution?

That depends on the specific requirements of a business. PIM and DAM systems cater to different objectives. PIM is the ideal solution for organizations to handle product information across numerous channels, and can update product data easily which can then be disseminated across systems . PIM systems eliminate a majority of the manual effort involved in this process and also mitigate the risk of human error. 

DAM, on the other hand does the same thing but for a different purpose—it effortlessly manages large volumes of digital assets. They often need a way to securely store all the data and enable instant access when required. DAM systems can help optimize these processes, which makes a big difference when multiple teams across the organization and locations are involved in managing digital files.   

In conclusion

PIM and DAM can both provide clear benefits based on the business need. Some PIM systems also include DAM functionality, thereby catering to both the needs of the organization. Both of these systems, however, are sufficient for handling all the product and digital asset management requirements that an enterprise might have. That’s why, in most cases, combining DAM with PIM is the best way to go. This results in a single source of truth for all product data and digital assets, enabling easier content creation, dissemination along with consistent customer experiences across multiple channels.

Author Bio:
Rakesh Kumar is Chief Solutions Officer at Pimcore Global Services (A Happiest Minds Company). He is responsible for designing high-performing and scalable cloud applications and managing engineering and pre-sale functions across geographies. Pimcore is an open-source platform for product information management (PIM/MDM), digital asset management (DAM), content management system (CMS), and eCommerce.