What is a Product Engine and why would I want one?
A product engine is a database that stores all your product and pricing data. This means you have a single source of truth: a place that both staff and systems can use to access the correct data.
Can’t I just use a spreadsheet?
You can absolutely use a spreadsheet. In fact, our research shows 9/10 of you use Excel to input supplier pricing, add margins and create price lists for distribution or upload to other systems (such as CRM, ERP or billing).
But it’s the limitations of spreadsheets that prompted us to create Product Engine in the first place.
What if you need to track changes? Or validate your changes and publish (via sync) direct to wherever you need the data? Approvals and validation for pricing changes can be done by emailing the spreadsheet to approvers/checkers with notes and saving versions, but it’s hard and it’s time consuming. If you have a lot of price points that change regularly it can be as much work to check accuracy and get approval as it is to make the initial pricing changes. Collaboration with online spreadsheets can help but it does not solve any of the fundamental challenges.
What about product images and specs etc?
A spreadsheet addresses part of the problem, but won’t include key elements like product images, specs, documents and all the associated data that your sales teams and customers want to be able to access. Most companies store their combined product and pricing data in an internal wiki or in shared drive folders (or often a combination of places). This often adds complexity, making finding the right data more challenging.
Key challenges.
Versions - Which is the latest version? I need to download it from where?
Location/s - Is this even the right folder?
Errors - You share a spreadsheet and someone changes a critical field accidentally or you fat finger a cell when updating and don’t notice.
Incorrect sell pricing - The biggie, it’s bad news and possibly career limiting when you are selling products at the wrong price points.
Why don’t I build my own database?
This is a viable option, particularly if you have a small and similar set of products. However, -if you have a large number of products or price points (or complexity in the variation of the products you sell) then building your own database gets hard really fast. We decided to go all in on ProductEngine when we discovered this was a lot harder than we first thought; it really is something that needs dedicated focus. A key goal of ours is to make - ProductEngine so easy for developers to use that it makes it clear that it's not worth the time to build your own.
Digital transformation needs ProductEngine
As Elons says “Great companies are built on great products”. It bears out then that products are the foundations on which you build a business. (A service is still a product). With this in mind, how do you digitally transform your business when your products and pricing are not well digitised? Most companies can handle getting their products into one system but as the number of systems grows (CRM, E-Commerce, Billing, ERP etc) this becomes harder and very time consuming.
ProductEngine saves time and delivers accuracy
The challenges facing Product & Pricing Managers and developers who need to access this data is not that it can’t be solved, it’s the time taken to solve it. Then to keep it up to date. Then to solve the accuracy problem as well. (Btw, how accurate is your pricing? How accurate is it right now? Do you even know?)
We see time and time again that ‘the business’ does not understand the time taken to stay on top of these things. This often plays out as putting unreasonable demand on output, or judging your employees poorly because their output to time spent ratio seems inconsistent. It’s way more work than the majority of bosses understand!
Could ProductEngine benefit me?
ProductEngine can benefit all staff that need to understand product and pricing data. The primary users are:
Product & Pricing managers - The user interface is designed with your needs in mind. Edit a single price or complete a bulk application then run the built in analysis to make sure the outputs are what you are expecting. Then, simply send to a designated approver: it will be auto published when approved or on the date you have set.
Developers - The API is designed to make utilising product and pricing data super easy and fast. If you are building an application or have an application that could benefit from auto-synchronised product and pricing data you should check out ProductEngine.
If adopting ProductEngine sounds like it might benefit you, sign up here to join the waitlist and we’ll let you know when it’s available!