With buyers keen on seeing payback for their investments in e-procurement and PTX, suppliers on the other hand being urged to participate in on-line sales channels in a great part by distributors and aggregators (which repackage the product data with catalogs from many like suppliers, and resell the content to companies undertaking e-procurement initiatives) that have constructed their e-commerce and collaboration platforms, PCM vendors have naturally abounded from many sides.
Yet, the all-encompassing content management solution is still in the ever-evolving design stage, as vendors try to piece together comprehensive systems. Therefore, as mentioned earlier on, there seems to be a proliferation (and subsequent confusion about) of the pertinent terms like enterprise content management (ECM), product content management (PCM), catalog management, product information management (PIM), records management (RM), product data management (PDM), enterprise data repositories (EDR), document management (DM), knowledge management (KM), web content management (WCM), digital asset management (DAM), enterprise information management (EIM), digital rights management (DRM), document imaging, workflow management (WM) or business process management (BPM) and more.
As also said earlier on, generally speaking, PCM or PIM refers to a system for managing all types of information about finished products, and it is a further evolutionary step of catalog content management backed up with a workflow management. This is however different from ECM, which focuses more on document management and unstructured editorial and web content, whereas PCM is more granular around individual data elements and focuses on highly structured product content. ECM encompasses many of the above-cited technologies used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes. In other words, it allows the management of an organization's unstructured information (e.g., e-mails, photos, spreadsheets, documents, etc.), wherever that information exists—stored in repositories, shuttled across networks, and managed over the course of its existence or life cycle.
However, regardless of the name and purpose, all the above software categories aim at the same goal of being the sole trustworthy, master source of product information for the enterprise. Still, business purposes for such systems could fall roughly into the following three groups:
1. The product information related to the design, development, and introduction of the products, which belongs to PLM and PDM, as its subset, that captures and manages product data generated during the product design and development process.
2. The information related to the buying (procurement) or selling side of e-commerce of the products, where PIM systems come into play later in the product life cycle, after a product is manufactured and introduced to the market. PIM vendors aim at helping manufacturers and distributors create centralized product information repositories that can be used for multiple purposes by people in various roles throughout the company and the supply chain.
3. The information about already owned products, equipment, and facilities, that is, assets.
Yet, to conduct collaborative processes, businesses need embedded intelligence, and business intelligence (BI) or analytics applications, focused on structured data offer only a part of the total solution. In other words, businesses also need content management for the unstructured data and content, which can contain a majority of business information, given that many decisions makers collaborate via e-mail or voicemail, which are examples of vast unstructured info that currently resides outside of business processes and of the reach of ERP and BI systems. Also, while PIM addresses data synchronization, ECM, bundled with strong storage management systems has been bolstered by abounding record retention regulations like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), or Department of Defense Requirements for Records Management Applications (DoD 5015.2). Owing to well-publicized accounting and document shredding scandals at the likes of Enron, enterprises must be capable to retrieve unstructured data quickly, at least in case of a court appearance.
sourec:http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/mainstream-enterprise-vendors-begin-to-grasp-content-management-part-three-challenges-17615/
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