With the emergence and growing importance of digital sales channels, the way product or catalogue managers author their parts data is becoming increasingly important for the automotive aftermarket, according to Elcome Managing Director, Tim Entwistle:
Why? Because when you have good product data management, this enables companies to make more informed decisions, improve customer satisfaction, and stay ahead of the competition. Here are my top six reasons why I believe good cataloguing should be a priority for every aftermarket business:
- Improved decision-making: Good catalogue management enables parts manufacturers to make data-driven decisions based on accurate and up-to-date information. Companies can identify trends, track product performance, and make informed strategic decisions
- Increased efficiency: Effective product data management enables companies to become more efficient. By consolidating and streamlining data sources, reducing manual data entry and duplication of effort, this can free up time for staff to focus on more value-added tasks
- Improved customer satisfaction: Good cataloguing also results in providing more accurate and reliable information to customers. This can help increase customer satisfaction and reduce the number of returns or complaints
- Faster time-to-market: Effective product data management can help launch new products faster. By having accurate and up-to-date data, companies can make more informed decisions about product development and speed up the product launch process
- Increased revenue: Good catalogue management can also impact the bottom line. With accurate, up-to-date data, companies can make informed decisions about pricing, promotions, and inventory management
- Competitive advantage: Finally, effective product data management can give companies that – all important – competitive advantage, especially in the aftermarket. Because, by providing accurate and up-to-date product information, you can optimise performance over competitors by achieving greater visibility and range coverage
That’s why I believe that more companies should be investing in better product data management tools that can establish data standards, consolidate and normalise data from different sources, improve data quality, and leverage analytics and business intelligence to gain insights.
By doing so, aftermarket companies will improve their decision-making, increase efficiency, improve customer satisfaction, launch new products faster, increase revenue, and gain a competitive advantage in an increasingly digital automotive aftermarket.
