OneTimePIM is a single source of truth for all of your product information with easy ways to distribute that data to wherever it needs to go, including the most powerful e-commerce connectors in the industry.
In this episode we speak with Pat Violaris, Managing Director of OneTimePIM, about the transformative power of product information management systems. We discuss the journey of a major US retailer that improved its operations through OneTimePIM’s solutions, the evolution of PIM technology, the challenges of siloed data management, and the importance of integration and customer support. Pat shares insights on leveraging AI for enhanced data management and the future of PIM in automating processes. The conversation also addresses common misconceptions in the PIM industry and emphasizes the company’s commitment to customer engagement and feedback.
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Show Notes
Takeaways
- OneTimePIM helps businesses streamline product data management.
- The journey of a major retailer showcases the effectiveness of PIM.
- AI integration has revolutionized data management capabilities.
- Siloed data is a major challenge for many organizations.
- Customer support and integration are key to successful PIM implementation.
- The PIM system evolves based on customer feedback and needs.
- Automation is the future of product data management.
- OneTimePIM offers unlimited support to its clients.
- Flexibility and customization are core features of modern PIM systems.
- The company aims to maintain a friendly, customer-focused culture.
Chapters
00:00 – Introduction to OneTimePIM and Its Impact
02:46 – The Journey of a Major US Retailer
05:29 – Evolution of Product Information Management
06:53 – Challenges of Siloed Data Management
09:18 – Methodology and Client Integration
10:39 – Integration Capabilities and Customer Support
12:36 – Onboarding and Data Porting Success Stories
14:43 – Leveraging AI for Enhanced Data Management
18:17 – Future of PIM and Automation
21:30 – Common Misconceptions in the PIM Industry
22:50 – Final Takeaway and Customer Engagement
Transcript
Beau Hamilton (00:05.728)
Hello everyone and welcome to the SourceForge podcast. Thank you for joining us today. I’m your host, Beau Hamilton, senior editor and multimedia producer here at SourceForge, the world’s most visited software comparison site where B2B software buyers compare and find business software solutions. All right, picture this. major US retailer was drowning in scattered spreadsheets and disjointed cloud files. Their product data was chaotic. It was fragmented and it slowed down their entire operation. And that’s when they partnered with OneTimePIM and what started as a
A simple effort to streamline product information, it quickly evolved into something quite a bit bigger. The result was a fully integrated Shopify store. had AI powered search capabilities and even a custom mobile solution that lets staff email product photos directly into their PIM system. And just by the way, getting the acronyms out of the way, PIM, PIM, that’s short for product information management. But this totally streamlined their operations and changed the way they manage product data.
And I bring this up because I think it serves as a great example of what OneTimePIM can do for your business. So to talk more about the company and elaborate on this story that I just talked about, let me introduce Pat Violaris, managing director of OneTimePIM. Pat, welcome to the podcast. Glad you can join us.
Pat Violaris (01:16.222)
Thank you, Beau. I’m glad to be here.
Beau Hamilton (01:18.766)
Yeah, it’s great having you here. I just want to go ahead and get started. know, assuming listeners don’t know anything about OneTimePIM other than what I shared at the intro, of course, could you give us your high level overview of the company and what you offer clients?
Pat Violaris (01:33.075)
Yeah, so we’re a family-owned business here in the UK software company. We’ve been around for quite a long time since 1996, and we do product information management systems. So we help retailers and manufacturers manage their product data. So there’s something that we’ve been doing for four years now. In the past, we were doing free estimating tools for electrical contractors, and that’s how we started, by doing estimating software with electrical manufacturers, and having to manage lots of data. And about four years ago, we thought, well, this what we’re doing now, which we’ve been doing for decades, we can apply this to any business anywhere in the world. So that’s when we got into PIM systems and making a system that could be used anywhere, anywhere in the world for any application.
Beau Hamilton (02:21.656)
Gotcha. Okay, I love the family aspect, family owned business aspect, and then the fact that you came from the electrical industry. I want to explore all of that, but before we jump into some of the technical aspects, I’d love for you to just kind of share that story I alluded to earlier about the major US retailer you helped out. It sounds like it was sort of a mess to begin with. How did it all unfold?
Pat Violaris (02:46.76)
Yeah, so we did a demo to them. the main head of IT was in the demo. And she kind of told us all the issues they having. We said we do these onboarding meetings that can go on week after week for as long as they want. We’ll do everything for them. And she just couldn’t believe it. She was like, every week? For like three weeks? I said, no, every week for as long as you want. So it could go on for six months.
So are you sure? said, yeah, that’s how we work. Because the aim is to help you build your solutions. I said, OK. Within two days, she was on board, signed up. I said, OK, I’ll take you up on that. Every week, we’re going to have meetings every week. I said, yeah, yeah, every week, every week. So we had these meetings every week. And gradually, we kind of worked out their issues. They had 40 visions. had to have over 100 users.
They had their data on various cloud platforms, their images were all over the place. So we had to bring everything together. So we did everything for them. We did the heavy lifting for them. So we actually physically got in, built the system for them, created the attributes, created the families, created all the, brought all the data in from different places. They didn’t have to do anything. They just had to observe and tell us week by week, you know, what they wanted us to do.
Pat Violaris (04:09.898)
That’s how it started, week by week. They’re just asking for more features. Can you do AI-based search instead of a simple search? Yeah, we can add AI search. Can you allow us to upload our photography direct into the system? Yeah, we can do that. So it kind of evolved, and we’re still talking to them now every two weeks. This is like 18 months in. So we’re still having those meetings, and they’re still providing us feedback.
Beau Hamilton (04:36.814)
Nice. Okay, yeah, that’s cool. That’s the fact that they’re 18 months in, mean, makes it as a testament to your sort of solution set and how good it is to work with you guys. This is great, because I love being able to visualize kind of how exactly your company can help others. And this example helps me do that. I got to say also, I just like resonate with the sort of like, yes, we can attitude of like, as something comes down the line of like,
Yeah, we can help you with that. We can help you with this. can, you know, yeah, we can fix this. I think that’s great. And now I’m curious, like when you first were established, when TimePim was established, you said about four years ago. Now, what were some of the needs you had to meet then compared to what’s required now? Like, is it largely the same or has it shifted to embrace some more like automation and AI tools, for example?
Pat Violaris (05:29.734)
Yeah, it has changed over the four years. So initially it was quite straightforward, you know, put all our data in all our attributes and try and train people to use the PIM. The PIM was fairly static in that you train people how to use it. Once they knew the features, the features would change kind of gradually. Things have started moving a lot quicker now. So the difference is everything’s now more dynamic. So the PIM isn’t a kind of static system because now with AI and auto-generated Python code, you can literally kind of generate features on demand because they can actually add their own, they can talk to an AI, ask it to build a feature for them inside the PIM. So things are much more dynamic. People are moving quicker. They want more features. Everything’s a lot quicker. AI has meant that we can do things now that we couldn’t do four years ago. It’s just made the impossible possible in a lot of areas.
Beau Hamilton (06:26.734)
Right? Yeah, it’s amazing how fast it’s growing too and just all these different features are expanding. And just the adoption rate is, I mean, it’s still just continuing to get adopted more widespread and make things more efficient. What were some of the biggest headaches you’ve seen just with storing data and on some of these old school methods, like maybe spreadsheets or Word documents? And how have you worked to sort of solve these big headaches you’ve experienced?
Pat Violaris (06:53.192)
Yeah, that’s the main headache is the siloed data between all the departments. So all the departments would have their own data, take care of their own data. So you’d get the technical people taking care of their own technical data. The marketing people would take care of their marketing data. Same product, same company, same product, but one group of people is putting some types of data in about that product. Another group is concerned about something. Another group is concerned about packaging and environmental data.
So all these different groups were siloing their data. They all had data about the same product in different places. sometimes you’d get, I mean, amazingly, the best data in the company would be in a PDF. It wouldn’t be in a database. So can you imagine it’s in a printable PDF, which is designed to be printed and it’s not searchable. It’s not accessible. It’s not in a database. So where’s your best data? it’s in the PDF. So we’d have to kind of reverse engineer everything, get everything from a PDF back into a database to then generate the PDF, if you see what I mean. So those are the biggest issues is really people working in these siloed environments where they just consider about their department rather than at company level. So PIM is about a single source of truth. That’s the idea of a PIM, that you have a single place for all the data about a product.
Beau Hamilton (08:17.644)
Yeah, so we talked about how your company has helped a major US retailer set up like a Shopify store, for example. You’ve talked about the AI-powered search capabilities and then just the communications that you have with the clients and then specifically regarding the sharing photos with the marketing team, I believe.
But broadly speaking, how does one-time PIMS approach to centralizing and cleaning product data result in some of these sort tangible outcomes for its clients?
Pat Violaris (08:50.57)
Yeah, because our methodology is kind of key, which is to do all the heavy lifting, work with the customer from day one, understand their pain points, understand their problems. And then we don’t just give them a software system and train them and say, you know, off you go, because that’s not in our interest. It’s not in their interest because we want them to be a long-term customer. We want them to use the system. So we then help them with the integration because
It’s not standard, a PIM isn’t a standalone system. doesn’t live on its own. It has to integrate with the ERP system, integrate with their website, the Shopify site, for example, or WooCommerce or Amazon. It’s got to get the data to all these different places. So they can’t really do that integration on their own without our help. That’s what we found. So that’s why in a way we do it for our own self-interest. We help them and we stay with them week in, week out until we’ve got all the integration done for them. And we keep.
Same because we get feedback from them and that’s really valuable because they tell us their pain points, their issues that leads to new features. So for us, it’s a win-win because they get this great support, which I don’t know, not many companies can do that. We’ll give them ongoing support, you know, with meetings, with Slack support and so on, but we get feedback. We get new features. We get to know what our customers need and that helps build the system, make it better.
Beau Hamilton (10:15.734)
Right. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. What about like you mentioned the integration and how important that is. That’s obviously a big selling point too, just in general, working with a new system can be, I don’t know, it can be difficult to learn something new. So you want to be able to have it compatible with as many different moving pieces and modules, et cetera. So how does one-time PIM integrate with other software and just platforms that businesses might be using already?
Pat Violaris (10:39.966)
Yeah. Yeah, that’s a good question. Because of this can do attitude that you mentioned that we have, we can do anything. So over the years, we’ve built so many libraries, we’ve built so many ways of integrating with things that there is almost, we haven’t found anything we can’t integrate with. So if somebody says, integrate with our ERP system, we’ve either built a connector already, or if we haven’t, we’ll build one and then we’ll use that for another customer at a later date.
so integration is super important and we, you know, we’ve got our attitude is, we’re a company of software developers, so we can build anything, integrate with anything. So when they come to us and say, can you integrate with this? answer is yes already, because we will integrate because that’s part of what we want to do. If you can’t integrate with their systems, we can’t get a working PIM in which case we can’t get a long term customer that’s happy with our service. So it kind of all has to, has to work.
Pat Violaris (11:37.322)
You know, and we don’t charge extra for that. Yeah, we don’t say if you’ve got a type of system We haven’t integrated with we’ll charge you more. Yeah, we’ll just build them a connector as part of the service if we haven’t already got one we’ll build it
Beau Hamilton (11:50.4)
Okay. That’s, that’s great. Yeah. So you, I think, I think what really stands out for me, is just the customer support and the hands-on approach. Like I, I know that you’re the one that’s you yourself is like, you’re, you’re working hands-on with a lot of these clients, right? You’re communicating with them. You’re making sure they’re happy. Like it’s not something that you’re kind of delegating tasks to necessarily to different, different people. Like I, I mean, I’m sure you are in many cases, but, just the fact that you.
You know, you’re working with people directly is really kind of a core pillar of your business, I would say. But can you talk about just some of the kind of support or training you offer, again, to help clients maximize the platform’s capabilities?
Pat Violaris (12:36.106)
Yeah. Yeah, there was one customer, for example, and they had all their existing data was in Magento, another system for their website. So all their data, the valuable data was in Magento and it was kind of sealed off in Magento. Magento is quite difficult to use, involves lots of developers. So they said, well, how are going to build us a PIM? So one of our developers spent two weeks porting all their product data from Magento into the PIM in one go. So they didn’t have to lift a finger.
So it created a version of their data. It brought in all the images, all the data into our PIM, created all the structures automatically, auto-generated from this code that we wrote. And within two weeks, they had a working PIM system. Now it’s outside of Magento, but it can update Magento. It can also update Amazon. It can also update their customers, their wholesalers.
It can also link in with the ERP system. All of a sudden that data is out of Magento. It can now be at the center of your company. And they didn’t have to lift a finger. All the porting was done by us. So that’s an example of, yeah, onboarding somebody quickly. our methods work because we’re so efficient, because we know what we’re doing and because we’re kind of, this method wouldn’t work for a lot of companies to offer unlimited support, unlimited.
interconnectivity and so on and so on. But the reason it works for us is because we kind of know what we’re doing so fast and we have a really good team that can do things really quickly because we’ve faced these problems continuously with other companies. We’ve built up a whole library of tools that we can use to automate things.
Beau Hamilton (14:17.486)
Very cool. Yeah, it seems like just the fact that they’re not able to, they don’t have to lift a finger. They can let you kind of handle some of these challenges and they can go tackle other aspects of their business. I like those efficiency gains. And it makes me just, again, sort of transition into the conversation into artificial intelligence because that’s something obviously where there’s all these different efficiency gains coming from it. More companies never are focused on, on these sort of ways to make their business more efficient and automated. And I think a lot of that has to do with making data that’s available, but turning it into something that’s usable. And you mentioned like the PDFs that companies have and like converting that into basically something that’s readable and usable because again, they’re like supposed to be printed out. They’re not supposed to be necessarily like edited and worked with.
So yeah, how are you using AI with your company and your product to improve data management?
Pat Violaris (15:18.698)
Yeah, so I’ve got a PhD in AI back in the 1990s, know, old fashioned AI. So I did a whole PhD in that for three years. So that’s always been an interest of mine anyway. But since the last couple of years when AI has really come to the fore and become really, really useful, way, way better than anything I was doing back in the 90s, we’ve kind of made it central to the PIP. So we’ve got these amazing things that you can talk to the PIP, tell it what sort of export you want. The AI will then write Python code to do what you want. And then you can test that and then you can run that with a few products. So if you want, for example, your PIM has everything in millimeters and centimeters for Europe, but you want it in inches for the US, you just tell the AI, you know, just create a transformation for me to create, to change millimeters to inches. It will write that into Python, output it, and then you’ve got your, your output exactly the way you want it. That’s just a very simple example, but you can create really complex examples as well.
So AI means that you can now literally, yeah, have you heard of plugins that you have a different software? Well, it’s like being able to create your own plugins, as many plugins as you want, because you just talk to the AI, it creates a plugin and it can do what you want it to do. So people like, for example, open source programs, because lots of people create plugins for them. You’ve got essentially thousands of developers around the world creating plugins that you can buy to make it more powerful like Shopify. Shopify is not open source, but it does allow lots of plugins. Whereas now with the PIM and AI, it means that you can have as many plugins as you want, because you can just ask the AI to create a plugin for you. Create me a special importer, create me a special exporter, create a little agent that goes through all my data and checks it every night for inconsistencies. So it’s no longer static. It’s no longer like a static piece of software. It’s now something that you can add bits to and add functions to and agent tasks and run your background.
Beau Hamilton (17:24.558)
Yeah, it makes me think of, well, like just the I feel like smartphone apps are going to be obsolete just with with these AI systems because they’re going to, like you said, have all these they’re essentially going to incorporate all these plugins. In other words, sort of replacing apps, basically incorporating all these apps built into the AI so you don’t have to really go anywhere else. You could just go right to your your AI, you know, agent or LLM of your choice. OK, that’s I really think that’s interesting, too, that you have a PhD in AI. Of course, I’m, I’m sure it had some sort of different machine learning type of term associated with it. But I’m curious, where do you see this all going? Four years that your company’s been in business, it’s already experienced. There’s been so much change in the last four years. Where do you see this going in the next, I don’t know, 12 months or maybe the next four years?
Pat Violaris (18:17.32)
I just see, because our objective is always to automate and take all the laborious tasks out of managing your product data and getting it. Yeah. E-commerce has become more and more active everywhere. Yeah. Lots of people are selling stuff online. So that’s that market is getting bigger and bigger. The e-commerce aspect and people need ways to manage that product data, hence PIM systems. But I see AI helping you manage that product data, taking away all the laborious tasks. Like for example,
I give a concrete example. Some people are exporting data out of the PIM using formulas to transform that data and then importing it back in. Now you can do that all in the PIM using an AI agent. You just go to the agent, tell it how you want to transform the data, creates the formulas for you, transforms the data and does it all inside the PIM. You don’t need to the data out and back in. So essentially you’ll be able to talk to the PIM in a sense.
Tell it how you want it to arrange your data or keep track of everything. Um, be able to get the data to look right for whatever destination you want it to go to. Yeah. Amazon, for example, have very specific ways they want the data to go to them. So you need to transform that data and that would be very, very laborious tasks. You’re talking, you know, a template with like 50 columns to set up and have to check that every time Amazon changed their template and everything that that’s we’ve automated that, you know, that has been automated now. So the PIM can just take that template and fill it in for you.
Beau Hamilton (19:50.658)
Yeah, I imagine these automations are really particularly exciting for you with your background. Would you say this is kind of where most of focus is looking at for future development plans, or is there anything else maybe you’re particularly excited about?
Pat Violaris (20:06.174)
Well, for the future, you mentioned I do, I work with the clients all the time. So now we’re trying to scale our company and expand. we’re doing some training and getting other people to be able to do what I do and work with customers and keep this kind of culture that we have of kind of seeing it as a benefit to give the customer as much time as they want rather than charge them for extra consultants or extra time or extra features. This kind of idea of just as all you can eat support, you know, just because it benefits us because the number of features we’ve added to the PIM that we have come from, from companies with pain points, because we don’t do what they do every day. You know, so only they can come up with new features because they have the pain, they have the pain of having a laborious task to do, like filling in an Amazon template. I don’t have that because I’m not a retailer. They have that. So they have to give me that pain so I can then create, create a solution to it and then I can make that available to all our customers. So it’s that philosophy. So that’s where I see the future is us kind of trying to scale this friendly approach that we have, which I think we can and doing it on a bigger scale for more companies by keeping this kind of culture of working with customers because they give us so much feedback. I mean, it provides so many great features.
Beau Hamilton (21:33.612)
Now, is there a common misconception, maybe you hear about the PIM industry that you’d like to debunk? I bet you hear a lot of different things.
Pat Violaris (21:41.139)
Yeah, the main thing is to think that it’s not going to be that PIM systems or just like other systems are going to be very difficult to customize to the way you work. Every company sees themselves as working a bit different to every other company, which they do, of course, but thinking that, it’s just going to be another big software system. I’m going to have to learn. It’s going to be inflexible and so on. It’s really our system anyway, is very, very flexible and it will fit and customize itself to your needs. Nowadays, systems aren’t dynamic. They can change. They can be customized. And they’re easy to use.
Beau Hamilton (22:23.534)
Gotcha, okay. So we’re coming down to our last couple of questions. And I think we’re probably gonna hear maybe some similar answers to what you just mentioned, but I still wanna give you one final opportunity to leave listeners with one final takeaway or important point. And that could be anything, any area could be particularly related to your company or the industry at large. Feel free to answer however you see fit. So my question for you, for you to wrap this up is if you could tell potential customers one big thing as if you’re maybe shouting it from the rooftop or if prospects only knew this, what would that one big thing be?
Pat Violaris (23:00.618)
It will probably be anything is possible. If you can think of it, we can do it. Yeah, anything is possible. If you can think of a quicker way to get your products to market. If you have creativity and ideas about how to get the products to sell quicker, how to get the information quicker, how to get this flow of data from maybe the original manufacturer in China all the way into your system and out to your website. We can do it. Anything is possible and everything is customizable.
Beau Hamilton (23:34.166)
I love it. Yeah, it’s it’s channeling my inner Kevin Garnett, Boston Celtics, anything is possible. Follow your dreams. For the basketball lovers. Yeah. Fantastic. Well, for listeners who want to learn more about about your company, OneTimePIM or get in touch with you or your team, where should they go?
Pat Violaris (23:55.851)
Yeah, they just go to our website, onetimepim.com, from there they can book a meeting. And from there, we actually do a free demo version for them. So it’s very relaxed. It’s not very salesy. They book a meeting. We talk about the issues they’re having, talk about possible solutions. And then they can get a free trial of the PIM system and use it for a couple of weeks with a demo version. And we even go so far as building their own mini PIM with their own product in it free of charge. So we do that, obligation. You just give us a bit of your data spreadsheet. We’ll build a mini PIM for you to actually see your own products and how they would look inside the PIM and try that out and use that. Yeah, and then we take it from there.
Beau Hamilton (24:43.682)
Awesome. Yeah. All right. Go to one, onetimepim.com schedule demo. They’ll work on a little mini PIM for you. That’s, that’s, that’s really cool. Well, thank you, Pat, for taking the time out of your day to sit down and talk with us. know it’s, it’s, it’s evening hours for you. So hopefully you can go and enjoy a drink or just relax.
Pat Violaris (24:58.888)
Yeah. Yeah. Thank you most. It’s been great talking to you too.
Beau Hamilton (25:04.718)
Awesome. appreciate it. Thank you all for listening to the SourceForge Podcast. I’m your host, Beau Hamilton. Make sure to subscribe to stay up to date with all of our upcoming B2B software related podcasts. I will talk to you in the next one.