5 August 2026

Top 3 Tips Before Launching Your PIM or MDM Project

Launching a PIM (Product Information Management) or MDM (Master Data Management) project can be complex. For over 20 years, our mission has beento support companies in the communications industry with their digital transformation. That’s why our industry experts are sharing their top 3 tips to ensure your project goes as smoothly as possible!

Implementing a PIM—and even more so, an MDM—will revolutionize the way your company is organized.

Identifying potential pitfalls or missteps in a project like this is no easy task. DATASOLUTION supports you throughout the preparation and design phases so that you can achieve your strategic goals and successfully complete your digital transformation in marketing.

Before we share our recommendations for getting started on a PIM or MDM project, let’s review the difference between these two concepts.

PIM vs. MDM: What’s the Difference?

Definition of PIM (Product Information Management)

PIM (Product Information Management), or GIP (Gestion de l’Information Produit) in French, is a solution that coordinates the management and multichannel distribution of product data to e-commerce sites, websites, printed product catalogs, and marketplaces.

More specifically, the PIM standardizes all of your product information while ensuring that all published content is constantly updated and optimized for SEO. It ensures the effective management of your products for sale in a multichannel environment. In particular, PIM is essential for any company in retail or manufacturing that has thousands of product SKUs and supplies content to websites, e-commerce platforms, or catalogs.

PIM is part of the broader concept of Master Data Management.

Definition of MDM (Master Data Management)

MDM, which stands for Master Data Management, or GDR (Reference Data Management) in French, is a set of tools used to store, manage, and distribute all reference data—such as product information, customer information, supplier data, financial data, digital assets, and more—within a company.

Master Data Management centralizes data in a single repository to simplify business operations. As a result, reference data is properly identified, safe to use, and of high quality. MDM ensures effective data governance within organizations that rely on data for communication.

Pimcore: The Open Source MDM Solution

Pimcore is the only open-source enterprise MDM on the market. Its open and flexible model allows you to create and manage any specific type of object you might need (customer, supplier, product line, or other). In addition, its integrated DAM structures and organizes your graphic assets. As a strategic partner since 2018, DATASOLUTION helps its clients integrate Pimcore into their IT ecosystem.

Learn more about Pimcore

Maps: At the Heart of Data Governance

Since 2011, Maps has been helping its clients by providing them with a comprehensive PIM, MDM, and DAM solution for managing strategic and operational data. This allows them to focus on their core business and growth, confident in the reliability of their data. As a Maps Champion Partner, DATASOLUTION supports its clients in implementing this data repository.

Learn more about Maps

3 Tips Before Embarking on a PIM or MDM Project

1. Involve your teams from the very beginning of the project

When an IT department initiates a PIM or MDM project on its own, this can lead to a disconnect between the needs of business users and the solution they expect. It’s essential to involve all your teams right from the start, so as not to lose their valuable perspective (as well as their day-to-day challenges) and to avoid the risk of discovering that your Marketing Production Platform was designed without features deemed necessary by business users.

How can you ensure you get interesting contributions? We recommend following these three steps:

At the start of the project, bring together the key departments involved to identify their challenges. To help you with this, DATASOLUTION organizes workshops with your marketing and communications teams to help them articulate their needs and then prioritize them.
During the requirements gathering and design phases, encourage teams to interact with one another and ask those involved to collaborate directly with the project managers. This will ensure that essential business features are not overlooked.
Throughout the project, organize consultation sessions and schedule regular meetings. The Scrum agile methodology, which we use at DATASOLUTION, will enable you to develop and implement your project plan (product backlog) so that, iteration after iteration, it helps you build the product best suited to your needs and those of your users.

When key users have a say from the very beginning of the project, you save time, achieve a faster return on investment (ROI), and foster greater buy-in from your teams—all of which support change management, the true key to your project’s (human) success.

2. Prepare your strategic data and teams

Many companies underestimate the work required to prepare data for integration into MDM or PIM systems. The experts at DATASOLUTION will help you organize and structure your data to ensure optimal data quality.

In addition, project stakeholders must pay special attention to preparing the team in advance.

DATASOLUTION recommends that you consider the following features:

the principal
the product manager
key users or reference users

Also, make sure you have a good mix of technical skills and managerial abilities withinthe project team.

Without these preliminary considerations, you run the risk of delays and/or budget overruns. When the team is well-prepared and on the same page, the next phase becomes much easier.

3. Have a clear vision and clear goals

You should ask yourself the following questions:

How will we define the project's success after it is implemented?
What is our goal in implementing a PIM or MDM technology solution? Are we looking to improve data quality? To unify marketing data? To improve the user experience? To increase organizational efficiency? To gain greater agility for growth? To diversify into new distribution channels or new markets?

Finding the answers to these questions (and reaching something close to a consensus) will undoubtedly set you on the path to the project's success.

In conclusion

DATASOLUTION helps you define your objectives and choose the most suitable solution to achieve them. Our industry experts will provide recommendations to ensure that all your teams are fully involved in the project from start to finish —from organization and methodology to selecting the right technologies.

Do you need help defining the scope of your PIM or MDM project? Let our experts help!