Data Management as a Commercial

Data Management as a Commercial Growth Opportunity

The IAM market faces an ever-growing challenge: managing vast and increasingly complex product data. Databases containing more than 10 million references are becoming the norm rather than the exception. While industry standards such as TecAlliance (TecDoc) and ACES & PIES (A&P) provide valuable support, the final 20% of data management often consumes 80–100% of the total effort.

However, this challenge also represents a significant commercial opportunity. Organizations that can efficiently manage, enrich, and leverage their data gain a competitive advantage, deliver a superior customer experience, and unlock new revenue streams.

The question is no longer how to manage data—it is how to transform a major data management investment into a strategic business asset that drives growth.

The Challenge of Data Consolidation

Customer-facing data is only part of the challenge. Many companies within the IAM industry have grown through mergers and acquisitions, resulting in multiple data models, disparate content structures, and overlapping systems.

In practice, some organizations invest heavily in harmonizing their data models and content, while others continue to operate multiple structures connected through increasingly complex mapping layers. Consequently, these approaches create operational inefficiencies, higher maintenance costs, reduced agility, and growing technical debt.

Ultimately, true efficiency is achieved through a single company-wide data model governed by a dedicated data management team. We have extensive experience helping organizations overcome these challenges through pragmatic, phased strategies that gradually transition fragmented environments into a unified data architecture without disrupting daily operations.

The Explosion of Data Volumes

The volume and complexity of data managed through PIM systems and custom databases continue to increase at an unprecedented pace. At the same time, as customer-facing platforms evolve towards marketplace models, a national IAM wholesaler can easily manage between 2 and 3 million active references.

One of the most significant challenges is pricing management. Traditional ERP systems were never designed to process and distribute pricing at these volumes while maintaining the response times required for a modern digital customer experience. Consequently, pricing management increasingly moves into PIM environments. However, many PIM platforms struggle to support the required performance, scalability, and update frequency.

Furthermore, for organizations active in both the IAM and OE markets, active assortments can quickly exceed 10 million references. The challenge is not the complexity of the data itself, but the sheer volume of inbound and outbound updates. A single supplier update can easily involve more than one million references, prices, and supersessions in a single processing cycle.

Although some enterprise PIM architectures can technically support these volumes, they often become increasingly expensive and operationally inefficient as scale grows. We have designed and implemented custom solutions that maintain performance, scalability, and cost efficiency while remaining straightforward to manage and evolve.

Best-of-Breed Combined with Custom Development

Successfully managing today’s data-intensive environments requires a balanced combination of best-of-breed software and targeted custom development.

For virtually every technical challenge, there is a specialized market solution available. However, every additional application introduces licensing costs, implementation effort, operational complexity, integration challenges, and dependency on specialized expertise.

On paper, an off-the-shelf solution with an 80–100% functional fit can appear attractive. In reality, many organizations utilize only a fraction of the available functionality while carrying the full cost, complexity, and vendor dependency of the platform.

As a result, the architecture often becomes more complex, innovation slows, and operational risk increases.

We have designed and operated hybrid architectures managing between 20 and 30 million active references, combining commercial platforms with custom-built capabilities where they deliver the greatest business value. This approach provides scalability, flexibility, and long-term cost efficiency while avoiding unnecessary architectural complexity.

Avoiding Vendor Lock-In and Managing Operational Costs

Vendor lock-in and operational efficiency have become critical considerations in modern data operations.

For every stage of the data lifecycle, there is a Gartner-leading or niche solution available. At first glance, these platforms offer impressive capabilities. However, their commercial objective remains the same: increase adoption, expand usage, and deepen dependency.

A solution that appears to be the perfect fit today can easily become tomorrow’s largest operational cost driver.

Therefore, when designing modern data architectures, organizations must evaluate more than implementation costs alone. Long-term operational expenses, scalability, licensing models, infrastructure requirements, integration complexity, and vendor dependency must all be considered.

Making the right architectural decisions upfront can prevent costly surprises and protect future profitability.

Turning Data into Revenue

The IAM aftermarket presents significant opportunities for organizations that can effectively organize, standardize, enrich, and distribute their data.

Well-structured product data improves discoverability, increases conversion rates, enhances customer experience, and enables new commercial services. Moreover, organizations can go beyond standard TecDoc content by enriching product information, creating differentiated content, and improving search engine visibility.

Data should not be viewed solely as an operational necessity. When managed strategically, it becomes a revenue-generating asset.

The Competitive Advantage of Non-Standard Assortments

This opportunity becomes even more valuable when focusing on non-TecDoc and non-ACES & PIES assortments.

While TecDoc and A&P data structures are relatively straightforward to manage, non-standard assortments often lack consistency, structure, and content quality. Nevertheless, these product ranges frequently represent some of the most commercially valuable opportunities within an organization’s portfolio.

As a result, network organizations have a unique opportunity to establish market leadership through centralized data management, content enrichment, and advanced content distribution capabilities. We have designed and built these capabilities for organizations across the IAM industry.

The Untapped Opportunity: Non-TecDoc and Non-A&P Assortments

In many organizations, non-TecDoc and non-A&P assortments account for approximately 20% of total sales. Despite their commercial importance, they are often poorly represented across digital sales channels and receive significantly less attention than standardized product ranges.

Meanwhile, B2C pure-play e-commerce competitors continue to move faster. They invest heavily in content quality, search optimization, product discoverability, and digital customer experience—and they are capturing market share as a result.

Therefore, this raises some important questions.

How does your organization compare?

Do you truly understand your competitive position? Are your products as discoverable, searchable, and commercially optimized as those of your online competitors? Are you fully leveraging the commercial value of your unique assortment?

Ultimately, organizations that establish a strong data foundation today will be best positioned to capture future growth, improve operational efficiency, and create differentiated customer experiences.

Over the years, we have helped companies design scalable data architectures, consolidate fragmented data landscapes, and build high-performance solutions capable of managing tens of millions of references. More importantly, we have helped them transform data from an operational challenge into a strategic commercial advantage.

If you are looking to unlock the full value of your data and create a sustainable competitive edge, let’s start the conversation.