Customizing Product Information Management (PIM) Systems For Engineering Data

Though hardly a new technology, product information management (PIM) systems continue to gain traction in the world of ecommerce, enabling businesses to collect, manage and enrich their product information and distribute it across various distribution channels.

Many major players in this space offer purpose-built PIM systems for enterprises to manage their product descriptions, prices, images and other information in a central location.

Beyond these consumer applications, however, there’s another lesser-known use case for PIM systems that involves the management of data related to engineered components, systems and products.

In this world, products have specifications and other technical data that must be managed in a meticulous way. Despite frequent engineering changes, the information must also always be correct, as the values are used to design and engineer other systems whose cost of failure is high — sometimes even dangerous.

These challenges are all the more difficult to overcome for small and mid-market engineering companies, which require custom PIM solutions to manage product data for thousands of technical products without breaking the bank.

This is where Directus comes in.

Meet T2 Content Works

T2 Content Works is a content creation, strategy and operations agency that works exclusively with industrial technology and engineering companies — from small startups to large, global manufacturers.

To support its clients content needs, T2’s services include the development of content management and product information management systems.

“Our clients face many challenges that are unique to the management of engineering data,” said Joseph Ogando, Partner, T2.

“Their products, which are used to design and build other industrial and automation systems, require lots of revision control and change management during their life cycle. Compared to many consumer products, the stakes are higher for our clients to always have access to the correct data.”

While a PIM system could address this need for data integrity, T2 needed the right kind of PIM system.

“Again, many of these requirements are unique to the technical nature of our clients and to the mission-critical nature of their products,” Ogando said.

For example, T2 needed a PIM system that could:

• Provide data validation capabilities.
• Work with the industry-standard SQL databases T2 has direct access to.
• Enable everyone in an organization to access accurate, up-to-date product information.
• Integrate with various enterprise, sales and engineering platforms, including customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP) and product lifecycle management (PLM) tools, among others.

Addressing Engineering Data Management Challenges With Directus

These requirements necessitated custom PIM systems, rather than off-the-shelf, commercially available software solutions that T2 would need to adapt to meet the individual needs of each client.

Although Ogando and his team evaluated several potential PIM candidates, including Contentful and Strapi, they ultimately selected Directus for its ability to overcome the unique challenges of its technical clientbase.

For example, Directus offers a robust data validation framework that would ensure the integrity and quality of engineering data over time, ensuring all product information is up-to-date and correct despite changes or revisions.

Its application programming interface (API) also enabled T2 to customize its clients’ PIM systems right out of the box.

“Using the Directus interface, we could quickly deliver cost-effective PIM solutions for all our clients — including the small and mid-market engineering organizations,” Ogando said.

Here are some of the other ways Directus and its powerful, PIM-perfect development toolkit fit the bill for T2:

Integration with other systems

Using Directus’s prebuilt API, the T2 team could quickly tie its clients’ engineering data to other enterprise and engineering systems.

At the same time, the data from these other sources, such as the CRMs, ERPs and PLMs, continuously enrich the engineering data to create a single source of truth for products. T2’s Directus-built PIM systems also work with the industry-standard SQL databases the agency has direct access to.

“Since Directus simply overlays any SQL database, we can do pretty much whatever we want with it,” said Mike Irene, Engineering Manager at T2.

Ease of data accessibility

According to Irene, it’s critical that any data related to technical products be accessible by everyone in a company — not just the sales team.

“For example, servicing these types of products requires accessing information related to technical documentation,” Irene said.

The Directus-built PIM systems function as the central repository for everything T2’s clients need to develop, build, sell and maintain their engineering components and systems. This information can include product descriptions, technical specifications, images, marketing information, inventory levels and pricing — both public-facing and non-public-facing.

Ease of scalability

In addition to its data validation capabilities, ease of integration with other tools and accessibility, Directus is scalable. As a result, T2 can meet companies where they’re at — and easily adapt the PIM system as the companies grow.

Low development time

The low-code nature of Directus’s API provides extensive backend functionality without a lot of development time.

“We don’t have to write an API from scratch,” Irene said.

Additional Performance Benefits

Another benefit of Directus is its ability to get the data modeling right. According to Irene, data modeling is time-consuming and requires numerous stakeholders.

“The information isn’t always going to be readily available in the format we need,” he said. “What we're doing is not that complex from an engineering standpoint, but the data models are complex and at times, nonintuitive. Directus knows the key to making the data modeling work.”

While Ogando, Irene and the rest of the T2 team run many Wordpress sites, they’re finding Directus is increasingly a better fit — especially as they start to add more functionality like continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), testing and higher levels of security.

“We’re benefitting from a whole new approach that lets us have more performant websites,” Ogando said.

What Does the Future Hold For T2 With Directus?

The T2 team has been migrating legacy Wordpress sites into Directus using modern JavaScript frontend frameworks — including Nuxt (Vue) and Next (React) — and Directus can support the agency in that effort.

“Directus enables us to address the unique needs of our clients, including the startups and mid-market engineering companies,” Ogando said.

“The sky’s the limit.”