Free and Open Source Product Information Management(PIM) System | Hacker News Reader

Free and Open Source Product Information Management(PIM) System

openpim.org

62 pointsOpenPIM19 comments

Why do they use the abbreviation "PIM" for something which was called Product Data Management (PDM) for the last thirty years? Seems to be a new use of the abbreviation (i.e. all PIM references in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_information_management are less than a year old). It was already used for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_information_manager. Did they switch from PDM to PIM in business and operations management education, or is this just an idea of the developers of the referenced software?

I am not 100% sure, but here is my theory. Master data management is the superset, covering tools and systems designed to manage data from many domains. Originally, ERP and large enterprise systems were where the “master” records were stored.

In recent years there has been some backlash against ERP systems, e.g. Oracle. Also, master data management was seen negatively in an increasingly federated system world - one with the Bezos mandate, microservices, reduced centralization, etc.

I’ve seen a general unbundling and remarketing of enterprise solutions in ways to make them more palatable to the newer generations.

Therefore, to escape the legacy image, ERP -> master data management -> product data management -> product information management.

I think it has to do with the evolution from big centralized systems to federated/distributed/independent but interconnected ones, and the corresponding branding/marketing changes over time. Especially to avoid terms seen as “legacy”.

The marketing might be a bit short sighted, but that is an opinion. Maybe the branding sells more copies, and for most of these companies that is all that matters.

From my opinion ERP is completely different here. ERP usually store product IDs and other operational product information. When PIM/PDM is focused only on product data and usually guys from marketing team is working a lot with PIM. PIM is considered part of MDM, because MDM solutions can work in different areas like customers, addresses, etc. While PIM is only for products, so we can call it Product MDM.

In the world before centralized MDM systems which were independent of their other enterprise operational/transactional systems, some organizations treated the data in their core enterprise systems as "master files" (I'm talking about quite a while ago).

"The concept of master files was transferred to some corporate computers as early as the 1960s and gained popularity during the 1970s and 80s when computers became more abundant. Master files contain essentially the same descriptive data – such as names, addresses, and basic summary information – as master data. Master files continue to be used as a part of some system databases and were a precursor to master data." [1]

[1] https://www.dataversity.net/a-brief-history-of-master-data/

Don't forget that Product Lifecycle Management (PLM, of which PDM is a primary area) is a discipline by itself, even covered by a couple of big standards (e.g. the famous ISO 10303 series for product data representation and exchange). PLM usually has it's own information systems (not identical with the ERP systems) which manage all product-related data including CAD/CAM files. PLM systems are used in the product development process whereas ERP systems are used in the production and order delivery process.

Thanks for the good explanation. And PIM systems are used in conjunction with ERP systems to manage product-related data and then exchange that data across different sales channels.

I couldn't forget it if I'm honest, I have to use an Oracle PLM product daily! :)

The overlap between PLM and MDM and PIM seems to be an area of complexity.

Do you think there is a clear direction here? Seems there is some overlap, but both are still needed as well as integration between these systems - since PLM usually doesn't master parties, financial data, etc. but rather engineering/manufacturing design item data.

Apparently the terminology has evolved since I studied the subject; I'm not familiar with current trends; some of the terms seem rather to be vendor specific marketing jargon for a subset or cross-section of PLM, ERP and CRM functions, or to mix up methodologies and supporting software.

Not sure if for the last thirty years, but for the last 10 years when I work in this field I have been using PIM term. I agree that there are other terms that are synonymous like PDM.

Almost everything listed in the Features page is not relevant to the typical PIM end-user. The page seems to be designed for the IT guy, who plays only a tech advisory role in the decision process for selecting a solution like this. What product information management problems does this solution promise to solve?

Thanks for the feedback.

You are right that the site is primarily for technicians who need to implement a PIM solution. So it's useful for those who know they need PIM and are looking for possible solutions. We are going to improve this in future, but now we are targeting the people who is looking for small, easy and free PIM.

There are several free PIM systems available, and we just want to share information that there is another alternative.

While I with rodolphoarruda that you need a page that sells the product to the user, I applaud the existence of this page.

As the person often tasked with evaluating, approving and deploying software, a page like the one linked to in this article can turn a multi-day review process (or weeks if I have to keep asking their sales people to relay questions to the technical team I'm not allowed to talk to and then relay back half the information they think they understood from said technical team) into a couple of hours.

Hi,

You can find free open source Product Information Management (PIM) software here - https://www.openpim.org

It has more features than the free version of Akeneo and is much easier to use than Pimcore (it's 2 familiar free PIM system).

Any feedback are very much welcome.

Cheers

There seems to be a bug in firefox where clicking the arrow next to a heading in the tree menu causes it to animate but not actually expand the tree on first click. It works second time and every time after that. This happens again after a page reload.

Thanks for the feedback. We will fix this.

Please take a moment and open the demo on a smartphone. It might not be the actual device for the end user but people will read this on HN and just click the link...and then get a very little disappointed

Many thanks. Yes, the smartphone is not the target device, but we need to support it better anyway.

I think this should have "Show HN" in the title. For people looking for an open source PIM, https://www.akeneo.com/ is also worth considering.

Akeneo is undoubtedly the most famous open source PIM. But it's not completely free. There is a free version with fairly large restrictions. And the commercial version isn't cheap.

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