1. Your Money Tree
Your electronic data is a business asset that can be transformed into a
‘money tree’ if you care for it properly. Good data equates to increased
sales, greater speed to market, reduced non-damaged returns and
lower printing costs among other benefits.
However, it’s not easy to make a money tree grow in the automotive
aftermarket. The ACES standard is a moving target that gets updated
(moved) every 30 days. Retailers, Resellers and e-Catalog providers
match your data against this target. If your data is rejected because
it’s ‘off target’ it can add 90 or more days to your time to market. That
is why managing your own products against industry standards
internally with web services is the best way to fast track your data
ahead of your competition, ensuring completeness before it's
submitted to data receivers.
Making this responsibility a part time job for someone within your
organization, who is not a catalog professional, is a risky decision. It’s
very tempting in a tight economy to avoid the cost, but there can be
an expensive downside. Your data is only kept up-to-date as time
permits. Improper fitments are not addressed in a timely fashion
creating returns. Data authoring mistakes create invalid and conflicting
records causing lost sales from major delays getting to market.
PIES data that is only filled out to the minimum information
requirement puts your products in a competitive disadvantage at the
point of sale. A retailer, re-seller, consumer or jobber has a choice of
selecting parts that have digital images, installation guides,
specifications and other relevant information or parts that don’t. Guess
which part gets purchased?
Evokat is a great vehicle to drive your data to market, but it won’t get
you there if your driver runs it off the road. If you’re too small or cash
strapped to afford a full time professional to harvest your money tree
think about outsourcing the responsibility to a professional cataloging
person that doesn’t have to be a full time employee. We may be able
to help find you such a person. Remember, if your salesperson is
spending hours trying to decipher the complexities of the ACES
standard, they aren’t out selling anything, and if it's outsourced to
someone other than your catalog or product specialist, you could add
significant time to market.