We recently had a customer catalogue eclipse 2.5 million SKUs. That is 2,500,000 unique stock keeping units with all the corresponding images, attribution, and inventory history that come along for the ride. It’s a lot of data for a single retailer.
Think for a minute; could your current systems and processes scale to 2.5+ million SKUs? How would your product management, warehouse management system and most importantly your inventory management system hold up? What about system responsiveness, searches, and page load times? If you’re like many retail operations out there, you know that growing your product catalog comes with material systems challenges.
Challenges to keeping a large product catalog or PIM with one million+ SKUs include: managing data integrity, streamlining product creation workflows, keeping real-time data-feed syncs across multiple sales channels, and giving employees access to the data when and where needed to effectively do their job. Here are a couple ways we get it done:
Robust and scalable infrastructure
Our team has had the luxury of building our infrastructure from the ground up…twice; once building an in-house ERP for a $90+MM/yr eCommerce retailer, and once as RetailOps. The results show. Responsive, dynamic, and fluid are the first impressions users have when viewing some of our 1,000,000+ SKU catalogues in the product search tool within our PIM - terms that apply to our entire suite of operations tools.
A PIM that enforces data integrity
When you get your data right, the operations involved in scaling your business become 10 times easier. Our PIM helps your team quickly and easily create products by presenting them with the right attributes at the right time thanks to simple to administer Attribute Dependencies. Being able to trust this data lets you scale in the products you offer, the employees to manage your data, expand in the marketplaces you’re offering them on, and get to beyond the 1,000,000 SKU mark without wasting time managing your data integrity or your infrastructure.
Efficient processes for product creation & receiving
Receiving product into the warehouse is labor intensive. Receiving thousands of unique products demands more man-hours from your warehouse team, but also presents an opportunity for great processes to drive huge productivity gains through your business operations. As a retailer, sales cannot be made until products have been received. By opening up bottlenecks at product receiving, Retailers can grow their bottom line by decreasing time-to-market and reducing operational costs per unit received.
Businesses reliant on large product catalogues to drive revenue have the most to gain from a great ERP built around efficient processes. RetailOps operations software was built to make your life easier by giving your team software that is responsive, intuitive, and scalable regardless of catalogue size or number of products being received.