What is PERFION?
Perfion offers a comprehensive PIM system as well as powerful DAM capabilities. If you want impressive data exchange across multiple systems and tech stacks, Perfion is the go-to solution for you. Uniquely, it has out-of-the-box integrations with Dynamics AX, NAV, and D365.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
What is Perfion?
Perfion is a comprehensive Product Information Management (PIM) and Digital Asset Management (DAM) system that provides a centralized platform to conveniently store and access your company's product information, with the promise of data accuracy and security.
As a best-of-breed solution, Perfion makes it easy to exchange data with other programs and tech stacks (ERP, CRM, CMS, PLM, supplier portals, and more) via an open API. This allows for the seamless sharing of data and metadata without constraints on readability and writability. What else? The platform has “out-of-the-box” integrations with Dynamics AX, NAV, and D365.
The platform offers a SaaS solution, so you can focus on securing your data, while Perfion takes care of hosting and cloud services.
What is Perfion used for?
Perfion comes with a “drag and drop” functionality that makes it easy to add new properties to different product types. You can auto-generate all types of prints using its report designer. These prints can be used to create catalogs, price lists, bar codes, QR labels, spare parts lists, and more.
The platform is built within the Microsoft ecosystem, so if you are familiar with Microsoft Office programs such as Excel, Word, and Outlook®, using Perfion will be easy. Also, all your existing data can be imported smoothly from Microsoft Excel.
Perfion comes with a Windows client and a user-specific browser client. They are both based on data from an SQL server/database. Users can connect to the database to create new products/fields and edit information. The changes can then be distributed to various channels.
Additionally, Perfion offers ETIM and GS1 integrations for data standardization purposes.
Other services offered by Perfion include supplier data importation, PIMcommerce, PIMedia, EasyCatalog, Image validation, and more.
Who uses Perfion PIM?
A lot of companies trust Perfion to effectively handle their product information effectively. Let’s take a look at some of these companies and how they benefit from using Perfion.
ILVA: ILVA is a Danish interior retailer selling 2 million+ products through their webshop and 40+ resellers. Perfion used the PIMedia solution to help ILVA to improve its image bank. See case study.
Schou: Schou is the biggest retailer of non-food items in Scandinavia. The company used Perfions PIMcommerce solution to achieve the launch of their Danish webshop in six weeks with extra languages. See case study.
Furnipart: Furnipart is a leading Danish furniture design company. Perfion helped the company replace its old CMS site with PIMcommerce. The result was a new site capable of handling images, descriptions, and translations (6 languages) more efficiently. See case study.
Why Is Perfion a Good Choice for Brands?
Why do companies trust Perfion’s PIM software?
Why is it good for Business?
Multichannel Marketing: Perfion provides brands with a single source for updated product information while allowing them to focus on their marketing strategies. With Perfion, you can integrate various communication channels, like social media, syndicated banners, and mobile apps, right into your marketing mix. Also, you can automatically deliver digital assets in your preferred format (Excel, CSV, XML, SQL) across all channels. Perfion also lets brands manage localized content seamlessly. What does this mean? You can reach all your target markets by using local languages and reducing barriers to entry into new markets. You can simplify the process of managing and adding language variations by connecting product information to marketing material templates and integrating translation agencies into your workflow.
Faster time-to-market: Perfion PIM promotes agility to handle changes fast by making it easy to update product information, even when launch deadlines are approaching and changes need to happen quickly. With Perfion, you can instantly update product information across multiple sites and media. This leads to better control of the product release cycle, data quality, and time-to-market.
Standard IT platform: Perfion offers a standard solution that is straightforward to upkeep and upgrade. It allows you to allocate your resources towards creating and improving content rather than endlessly modifying your IT system. Which of course leads to lesser costs.
Handling unlimited Product Hierachies: Perfion is capable of handling an unlimited number of product hierarchies, which simplifies the process of organizing and aligning your product information for external partners such as online marketplaces, data pools, and classification standards like UNSPC, eCl@ss, and more.
Why is it good for IT Managers?
Open XML-based API: Perfion has standard connectors and web services (Open XML-based API) used to transmit real-time data and images to websites, e-commerce platforms, and bespoke applications.
Perfion E-Commerce API: The Perfion E-Commerce API is a specialized tool designed to facilitate the swift and flexible integration of product data with e-commerce systems. This API enables product information to be used and displayed on an e-commerce platform.
The Perfion E-Commerce API has been extensively tested and refined over several iterations and is used as the foundation for many out-of-the-box integrations with various e-commerce systems, such as Sana Commerce, Magento Commerce, Shopify, and Ucommerce.
Features of the Perfion E-Commerce API include:
Configurability within Perfion.
Support for various entities, including sites, products, categories, and variants.
The ability to handle variants in any number of dimensions.
Support for related products, images, and attachments.
Multilingual support.
The ability to manage multiple shops, even those with different configurations and those set up in different e-commerce systems.
Support for paging and incremental queries.
Comprehensive, yet simple, XML output.
Easy debugging via the built-in Perfion API Query Tool.
Thorough and easy-to-follow documentation
Product Configuration via drag-and-drop: With an easy drag-and-drop interface, the team members can effortlessly handle and update product data across platforms such as portals, websites, datasheets, price lists, brochures, and more.
Fast Implementation: Perfion is a standard application built on the .NET framework that can be implemented swiftly. It is a rigorously tested and accredited solution offering significant usability and a low TCO.
Why is it good for Marketing Managers?
Personalized Communication Across multiple segments: With Perfion, marketers can ensure that their materials stand out by customizing the content, design, and selection of products to cater to each market segment. All with full confidence that product information is up-to-date.
Pre-built Design Templates: Perfion comes with pre-built design templates that auto-update with the most recent changes made to the product data.
Quicker Material Generation: The flexible and intuitive system allows you to modify product information and aesthetics. Plus, you can create new materials like segment brochures in a matter of hours, rather than weeks.
List of Features
Let’s take a look at Perfion's features
Life Cycle Management
Perfion's PIM system provides robust Life Cycle Management for products. Here's how it works:
Initial Phase: Product life usually starts long before it needs to appear in marketing material and on the website. First, it undergoes an evaluation and approval process until it is released to the market. During this process, Perfion provides a place to store the information and track the process.
For Distributors: Perfion helps in identifying changes in product data, new products, deactivated or reactivated products, and substitute products. In all cases, the products and changes need to be evaluated, enhanced, and approved.
For Purchasing & Sourcing Process: Perfion supports supplier evaluation, supplier specifications (drawings, sketches, technical specs, and more.), and Quality Assurance specifications.
Release Management: In Perfion, once products meet defined criteria, they can be released. The release can be to an ERP system for prices and transaction handling or published to an e-commerce website.
Data Mapping
Perfion's Data Mapping feature is about transforming, combining, and validating your data as it enters or leaves the Perfion system. This feature is used when you need to exchange data with suppliers, partners, and customers, who might use different formats and structures for their data.
Data Mapping in Perfion is about transforming data from one format to another, and not only from a technical perspective (e.g., Excel, CSV, XML, SQL) but also from a logical perspective (e.g., different data models, measures, naming standards).
Perfion PIM offers a built-in tool called "Perfion Actions" that serves as a powerful Data Mapping framework. It allows you to create your own "Action Maps," which can consist of several steps performed in sequence.
Perfion Item Triggers
Perfion Item Triggers is an integral feature of the Perfion PIM system, designed to streamline and automate workflows to ensure consistent, valid product data. These triggers perform a variety of automated actions when a specific event occurs involving a product item or article
Perfion Item Triggers can work in conjunction with Perfion Actions, adding another layer of automation. When a trigger is activated, it can automatically initiate an action consisting of different steps carried out in a specific order.
These actions can include things like the automatic import of product information from suppliers, with the action transforming the supplier’s data to match your formats. All these processes happen immediately and are invisible to the user, allowing you to continue working on other tasks.
Read More about Perfion Item Triggers.
Translation Management and Language Versioning
Perfion offers a Translation Management and Language Versioning system that allows users to handle product information in multiple languages, efficiently and conveniently. Perfion enables the maintenance of data in various languages, particularly beneficial for multi-lingual textual descriptions of products. There are three main methods of managing translations in Perfion:
Direct Translation in Perfion: Users can view and edit data in multiple languages simultaneously within Perfion. Users can also track the progress of translations using a "traffic lights" system that shows the status of translations on a product-by-product basis.
Integration with Google Translate and DeepL Translate: Perfion also integrates with Google Translate and DeepL Translate, providing the ability to quickly translate individual texts through 1-click translation proposals. Users can manually correct these proposals and choose between different sources and target languages.
Working with External Translators or Agencies: Perfion allows for seamless collaboration with external translators or agencies. This is achieved through a straightforward process of exporting relevant product information, sending it for translation, and then re-importing the approved translations. Perfion supports both manual and automated translation processes.
Read More about Perfion Translation Management and Language Versioning.
Powerful DAM Functionalities
Perfion's DAM feature allows users to store, organize, and manage all product-related images and files in one place. The DAM feature offers automatic scaling of images. This functionality allows for automatic conversion and scaling of images based on a simple set of rules.
This eliminates the time-consuming process of manually adjusting image sizes and formats for various marketing channels. For instance, original images saved in TIF or Adobe's PSD format can be automatically converted to .jpg, .png, or .gif for appropriate marketing channels such as websites, webshops, or print catalogs. This means that users only need to maintain one single version of a file.
With Perfion DAM, you can arrange your file libraries to your preference, allowing you to create as many media libraries as needed.
Finally, Perfion offers flexibility in storage options. Companies can choose to store their images, videos, and audio files in a database of their choice or in Perfion's cloud service.
Read more about Perfion DAM.
Support
Perfion although not having a specific support page, comes with many resources such as Perfion TV, PIM Wiki, fact sheets, blogs, and more, to help users wrap their heads around what PIM is, before or after embarking on their journey. You can also download guides on the website if you ever feel lost.
In Perfion, you can take a test to help the Perfion team determine what best suits you in your PIM journey.
Pricing
Perfion’s pricing plans come in four packages/plans (entry publishing, entry commerce, business, and enterprise). You need to “Request pricing” to get a correct quotation of the prices for each plan.
WHAT DO USERS SAY?
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