In any business, every department generates data points. Each product data set can transform into actionable insights. What’s interesting to note is that most of the time, data generated from one department can help another. The businesses on top of their game rely highly on inter-departmental product data sharing. This revolution in product information management helps you squeeze a data sets potential to its fullest.
In the early days, brands formulated marketing campaigns as per the trial and error method. But once they tasted the power of data, there was no going back. With data becoming indispensable for brands all across the globe, there were various new avenues to explore.
Here, we will concentrate on using data to its fullest. So how do we do that? We use data from one department to drive and streamline the operations of another. This cross-connection of data can ultimately help you achieve efficient coordination in the working of all your departments.
source: www.data-flair.training
This blog will help you understand how product information management and inter-departmental decision-making go hand in hand.
Why is inter-departmental product data management crucial?
Raw data is a storehouse of potential. It can give you insights that can transform how you approach real-world consumer and product issues.
A dataset is of use for more than one department. Whereas the other department will fail to make sense of it, let alone use it. This prejudice is one that you need to break free from to revamp your current footing. Now, how will these departments make use of this raw data?
Summing up, the real challenge is improving accessibility and simplifying this data so that more than one department can make sense of it. Start with giving access to product data to each department.
Secondly, product information management platforms can gather data and categorically streamline it to make profiles and reports of your product categories. Such reports provide you with crucial actionable insights for each department in your business.
An example to simplify the importance of product data sharing
Let us take a classic example of the apparel industry.
Your company manufactures t-shirts in 5 colors. Your sales team digs up data on how each of these colors are selling. Now, how can you use this information?
There are several actions you can take. To begin with, you can study which color is more profitable. This study can allow you to maximize your profit. Secondly, if you also add up the size component with each of these colors, you can streamline your resource and financial management. This category of data also aids demand forecast. Thus, it is an excellent opportunity for operations managers to exploit.
Moreover, these data sets help one identify loopholes in one’s marketing campaigns. As marketing and design work pretty much closely, it gives them actionable insights too.
Therefore, any such piece of data has more juice than appears. So before you discard any such study, see to it that your departments use it and reuse it as much as possible.
How can product data change departmental functioning?
At this stage, you must understand which dataset can serve which department and how. Let us go digging.
source: www.shopify.com
Marketing
To create an impactful marketing strategy, you need data for trend forecasts and predictions. Various classes of product data can thus show you where and how to steer your way. What adds up to a campaign is how you improve your campaign as per the trend shifts.
Moreover, you have to keep improving the campaign as per the changing customer sentiments as well. This development is possible only when you know what your customers stand for.
Your marketing team can utilize data from sales to understand what appeals to your customers. When you try to experiment with an exclusive product, you can use data from sales and designs to maximize your impact.
For instance, your campaign doesn’t just revolve around your product data but also the tiny elements of a poster you float or an offer you put forth. At this point, data from previous campaigns can come in handy.
We can be sure that informed decision-making is crucial for a campaign’s success with this in mind.
Sales
Sales are all about reaching the right customers at the right time. You can float various campaigns to improve sales. Sometimes you work with AdOps, while at times, you work with the marketing team.
All your sales data, be it testimonials or statistics, helps understand what drives customers in the first place. Secondly, it forms the base on which the marketing team builds its work. These also help you in conversion, which is the sole goal of a sales representative.
Furthermore, finance gets a boost when sales flourish, and after that, they can reassess capital sharing. Sales statistics streamline the production process by helping the team fixate particular articles more than a few others.
Design
Design is a department more crucial and fundamental than we know. But a single change in the color palette can change the consumer response. It comes down to understanding what excites your audience and then keep acting on it. The key to this is product data.
The design has two components – one concerns the product design and the other interface design (such as your website and application).
Designers learn by experimenting, which gives a set of product data points that come in handy in the aftermath. For example, studying bounce rates, traffic, and clicks tells them how they experience changes with a specific design and layout.
In addition to this, website and application design are decisive for user satisfaction. Every application performs differently on different interfaces such as laptops, smartphones, or tablets. Ensuring usability in each is a challenge that every brand faces. For these reasons, product data comes in handy even to designers.
Production
The decisive test of consumer satisfaction of any brand lies in its products and services. It is the source of all data for your brand, big or small. That is why it forms the base on which marketing and sales teams can design and create powerful strategies.
You can use competitive product data and compare it with yours to get insights. These insights will help you improve your product’s quality and design. Consequently, you can improve how you engage your customers.
Subsequently, it is the sales and the marketing team that get to the forefront. They execute and earn you the desired profit by reaching out to the customers. They can achieve this only when they have exact product data.
Therefore, with production on one end and all the other departments or the other, you can see a cause-and-effect phenomenon with product data management.
Also read: 11 Competitor KPIs Every Brand Should Track
Finance
The finance department is the engine of any business. It drives the work of all the other departments.
Acquiring the right product data requires capital too. While outsourcing the job of data handling to an outside firm, you must be careful to identify the best bidder. While working with finance data internally, you have to align your work with that of the other departments.
In finance, the type of data ranges from capital share for each unit, profit generated from each investment, and a few others. These data points are crucial even for resource management.
With the right product data, a finance executive can understand where to pool in more capital. You can boost your marketing campaigns by creating more advertisements.
To manage increasing product demand, you need to boost your production line and supply chain. At times, you can optimize your design to improve your profit margins. Finance is an area rarely left untouched while planning and executing expansion too,
Therefore, with the right product data, the finance department can streamline all other departments’ work.
Try Datahut!
At Datahut, we deal with A to Z of data. We extract data from all kinds of sources and give it to in the simplified form. With our methods of data processing, it becomes easy for you to get actionable insights. What’s next? It is time you implement these takeaways from product data and take your business to new heights.
It’s time that you join the revolution of data-driven decision making. For all your data needs, from reputation management to price comparison, Datahut is here to lead your way.