InfoSphere MDM Server for PIM allows companies to create a single, up-to-date repository of product information that can be used throughout their organization for strategic business initiatives A flexible data model - product, categories, hierarchy/taxonomies and location and extensible data modeling capabilities to build data models that evolve as your business evolves. Data aggregation and syndication - supports data imports and exports over several standard protocols and flexible data formats to minimize impact on interfacing systems. Collaborative workflows - collaborative tasks allows organizations to setup workflows that reflect existing and new business processes and business rules, thereby having a system that closely aligns with your business practices. User experience - UIs for data authoring and search including single-edit screen, mass update screen, category mapping UI, faster and simpler searching, single sign on (SSO), and web style content via rich text editor. Link to unstructured content - integration to content management applications. Reporting - advanced auditing and reporting with configurable history tracking. Integration - built-in, proven integration with InfoSphere MDM Server. SOLUTION EXAMPLES: Single view of products enables a better multi-channel experience by providing consistent, complete, and accurate product information to customers. It also provides complete and consistent product information across all commerce channels e.g. eCommerce, store, kiosk, mobile, print catalog, Global Data Synchronization (GDSN). Single view of suppliers and partners gives organizations a single reliable source of information to use in communicating to partners, providing effective means for suppliers to submit product data via Supplier Portal or GDSN interfaces and capture and report back data errors at the time of submission. This significantly reduces time and cost and improves productivity with the partner and supplier network. Operating systems supported: AIX, HP-UX, Linux, Solaris (Sun microsystems)

Master data management (MDM) is a methodology that identifies the most critical information within an organization—and creates a single source of its truth to power business processes. MDM involves a number of technology solutions, including data integration, data quality, and business process management (BPM). It delivers: A single view of the data—Creating a single, authoritative view of business-critical data from disparate, duplicate, and conflicting information lets you see, for instance, that Rob Barnes and Robert Barnes are the same person. A 360-degree view of the relationships—Business rules let you identify the relationships among the data, so you can combine data showing Robert Barnes owns a Razor scooter with data showing he bought it at a Target store. A complete view of all interactions—Integrating the transactions and social interactions that have occurred with that product, customer, channel partner, or other data element gives you a complete view of that customer. Not all MDM solutions are created equal. When considering options, look for these features: Flexibility—MDM is a journey. Although your business may first buy a product for one type of data integrity problem, you should be able to use that solution to solve additional ones. Built for data variability—Likewise, it needs to handle multiple data types: customer records as well as products, locations, accounts, and all related elements. Designed for complexity—Not understanding relationships can cost your company money. You should know if two people belong to the same household or if a customer owns more than one of your products. Scalability from small to big projects—Many MDM problems are exceedingly complex. But you don’t want to take a year for the initiative to get off the ground. You want the ability to break down a data problem into smaller components. Configurable—An MDM system shouldn’t require coding, which comes with testing and maintenance headaches.