Workflow Management: Work More Efficiently and Drive Agility in PIM
The landscape of customer-facing channels has become more fragmented, and customers encounter product content in increasingly unpredictable ways. Product managers and marketing & sales operation teams now use various channels to support their multichannel marketing strategy. The fragmented channel landscape continues to pressure enterprises’ multichannel efforts, with marketers having to orchestrate campaigns across a range of communication channels. This means customers have more opportunities to encounter rich product data in unpredictable ways.
Without adequate protocols and workflow management system in place, many brands experience several management challenges:
- Complexity in aligning product data consistency as well as product value propositions across communications channels
- Lack of coordination across multiple teams in streamlining product content
- Misaligned communication planning processes across teams in organizing, enriching, and publishing product content across channels
- With a lack of coordination, each team would work in silos and create its timeline and planning schedule for destined activities
Consequently, product managers and marketing teams struggle to maintain product content consistency and brand consistency, creating confusing customer experiences and interactions.
Business Perspective
Consumers have access to a broader range of communications channels than ever before, drastically increasing the potential number of brand touchpoints. This means brands have a greater opportunity to engage directly with customers where they are in the moment. However, the increased number of touchpoints increases the risk of overwhelming or confusing customers with too many annoying or inconsistent product content if teams are not aligned across the whole product data management lifecycle.
Product data tends to be hierarchical. Access to product data needs to be controlled between groups of product managers, legal teams, marketing and sales teams, creative agencies, designers, and more for approval and final output. To address this challenge, workflow management plays an important role in aligning planning processes, timelines, and workflows across teams.
A workflow management system in a PIM software enables you to comprehensively define, manage, and execute workflows that are driven by an automated engine. It allows product managers to define and model workflows as per their needs, set their deadline, get a better view on information-flow, perform audit trail, reduce risks, and improve the timeline estimates.
The integration of product information management with workflow management capability provides better consistency and continuity in product content. For, e.g., in the manufacturing unit, a PIM system enables the management of product definitions, attributes, and related assets, where workflow data and its automated engine can cater to the instantiation, scheduling, and enactment of those product definitions and related attributes. Thus, you have a better way to communicate the process across teams visually.
Moreover, every product manager wants to eliminate downtime and shorten the planning cycle. But they in each function may not always realize the full extent of product data management activities dependent on their outputs and, therefore, may not plan their activities accordingly. With workflow processes in place, the project managers effortlessly create and customize workflows according to their needs to boost accuracy and productivity while minimizing risks. They could then understand their information flow at the individual task level, catalog key deliverables, and identify intergroup dependencies.
Why Implement Workflow Management?
- Visibility: Provide visibilities all product information, related documents, communication, and progress reporting in a single place accessible anytime and on multiple devices
- Control: Take a better control of expanding workload, teams, and capabilities of your business and application infrastructure to reduce risk and improve efficiency
- Efficiency: Streamline workflows plus automate approvals and reporting, thus decreasing unnecessary and manual steps
- Flexibility: Easily reprioritize as the day-to-day or strategic needs of the business change with more agility than ever before
Pimcore Workflow Management
The workflow management abilities of Pimcore PIM software help enterprises draw the contours of their workflow by allowing them to pick from drop-down selections and modify workflow paths to keep up with the updates in the business process.
Pimcore workflow management provides configuration of multiple workflows on Pimcore elements (product data, digital assets, and more) to support data maintenance processes, element life cycles, and various other processes. Key highlights of Pimcore workflow management include:
(a) Configuration
The workflow configuration takes place in the Symfony configuration tree in the Pimcore namespace. For details of configuration options, see Configuration Details.
(b) Events
Pimcore workflow management fires several events that can be used to customize and extend functionality. For details, see Working with PHP API.
(c) User Notifications
Notifications (via email or Pimcore) can be configured to be sent to users when a transition occurs. To do this, simply specify an array of user(s) or role(s) that you would like to be notified in the transition definition options section.
(d) Workflow History
In the "Notes & Events" tab (as shown in the image), there is a list with every action used on the object via the Workflow module.
(e) Workflow Overview
If workflows are configured for a Pimcore element, an additional tab with workflow details like all configured workflows, their current places, and a workflow graph is added to the Pimcore element detail page.
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