Sometimes Having Multiple PIMs Makes Sense

This is Part 3 of our 4-part series on Global PIM Strategy. Part 2 explored consolidation strategies. Here we examine when maintaining multiple PIMs is the strategic choice for large organizations.

---

Remember that Fortune 500 retailer with 15 PIM instances we mentioned in Part 2? The one who had “all the PIMs”?

Well, here’s the twist: After their consolidation task force spent two years and seven figures trying to unwind it all, they made a surprising discovery. Some of those “redundant” systems weren’t redundant at all. They were solving specific problems that no single PIM could handle elegantly.

This realization changed their entire approach. Instead of forcing everything into one system, we helped them to begin orchestrating multiple platforms strategically, starting with a centralized data model. And they made progress. They needed the right plan, and the right model. In their world, they needed a hyrbid strategy.

So yes, sometimes, having multiple PIMs makes sense. In this article, we’ll explore the reality of multiple PIMs in practice vs the “ideal state” of a truly centralized, consolidated model.

Let’s Be Real About “Single PIM” Organizations

I tend to be skeptical when organizations proclaim they have “one global PIM,” as there’s often more to the story. Scratch beneath the surface and you’ll find Excel files on SharePoint managing seasonal attributes, departmental Airtable bases tracking marketing content, and that one person who “just knows” where all the technical specs live, or how we get suppliers set up.

The choice isn’t really between one PIM and multiple PIMs. It’s between a declared multi-PIM architecture and an undeclared one, where the “other PIMs” are frequently shadow IT systems operating outside governance and integration.

Acknowledging the need for multiple, specialized systems allows you to bring this complexity into the light, govern it properly, and actually reduce risk.

The Evolution of PIM Strategy

The PIM world has matured significantly over the past decade. We’ve moved beyond the simplistic “one PIM to rule them all” mentality to recognize that different platforms excel at different things.

Think about it this way: You wouldn’t use a sports car to haul lumber, and you wouldn’t take a pickup truck to a race track. Yet somehow, we expect one PIM to handle everything from complex B2B configurations to Instagram-ready lifestyle content, globally. That’s asking a lot.

The most sophisticated organizations we work with have figured this out. They’re not trying to eliminate all their PIMs. They’re trying to optimize their PIM portfolio. It’s the difference between consolidation for consolidation’s sake and strategic architecture design.

It’s important to recognize that “PIM” is not a single system. It’s a business process – many, in fact. The platforms are extremely important, but PIM is bigger than any single piece of software. It’s people, process, technology, workflow, governance… it’s the heart of e-commerce operations, and in today’s world, lines are blurred between ERP, CMS, PIM, MDM, DAM, Commerce, Workflow, Portal, AI orchestration, microwave ovens, all-in-one printers, etc.

Okay, maybe not the last two. But you get my point – the leading commercial solutions are extremely capable, but it usually “takes a village” (e.g., multiple platforms) to meet the needs of a global org when it comes to collecting, managing, and publishing product data in a multi-channel environment.

When Multiple PIMs Create Strategic Advantage

Leveraging Platform Strengths

On that theme, here’s something we see repeatedly: Organizations purchase different PIM platforms specifically to leverage their unique capabilities. One platform might excel at multi-domain master data management with sophisticated governance workflows. Another might be unbeatable for rapid content syndication to hundreds of retail channels. A third might offer the best tools for managing digital assets alongside product data.

Rather than compromise by forcing everything into one system, smart organizations are asking: “How can we use each platform for what it does best?”

This isn’t about vendor preference – it’s about capability alignment. Every platform has its sweet spots. The key is understanding these strengths and designing an architecture that leverages them effectively. Yes, there is often redundancy. But it’s not necessarily a bad thing.

The E-commerce Channel Reality

Modern e-commerce isn’t monolithic. Consider the vastly different requirements across channels:

Marketplace selling demands rapid syndication, real-time inventory updates, and the ability to adapt to each marketplace’s unique taxonomy. You’re managing products on Amazon, Walmart.com, Target.com, and dozens of other platforms, each with their own rules and requirements.

Your “brand.com” D2C experience needs rich storytelling, lifestyle content, personalization capabilities, and seamless integration with your content management system. This is where you control the narrative completely.

B2B portals require customer-specific pricing, complex configuration logic, technical documentation, and integration with CPQ systems. Your dealers and distributors have completely different needs than your end consumers.

Social commerce operates on visual-first principles, requiring shoppable posts, influencer content integration, and the agility to capitalize on trends before they pass.

Trying to optimize one PIM for all these channels, teams, and needs is possible, but is it optimal?

The Global Market Mosaic

Let’s talk about the elephant in the room: global operations. When you’re selling in 50 countries across 6 continents, the idea of perfect consolidation starts to feel less like a goal and more like a fantasy.

Different regions have fundamentally different e-commerce ecosystems. In China, you’re dealing with Alibaba, Tmall, JD, etc. which have vastly different operating models compared to Western marketplaces. In Latin America, Mercado Libre has its own unique requirements. European markets come with GDPR and sustainability reporting obligations that don’t exist elsewhere.

But it goes deeper than just channels. Regional teams understand their markets in ways that centralized teams simply can’t. They know that product descriptions that work in Germany fall flat in Brazil. They understand local holidays, cultural sensitivities, and market dynamics.

We’ve seen too many consolidation efforts fail because they tried to force local markets into global templates. The loss of agility and market responsiveness often costs more than maintaining separate systems.

The Supplier and Legacy Reality

Here’s something that often gets overlooked in PIM discussions: suppliers have a voice too. And often, that voice is saying “we’ve done it this way for 20 years… and we don’t want to stop.”

Many organizations inherit supplier relationships with established data exchange patterns. Suppliers might be comfortable with specific formats, particular portals, or even legacy EDI connections. Forcing them to adapt to a new centralized system can be surprisingly disruptive.

This is where a dedicated supplier portal becomes a strategic asset. Instead of forcing thousands of suppliers to learn the intricacies of your internal PIM, a portal provides a simplified, purpose-built interface for data submission. It acts as a crucial buffer, handling data validation, normalization, and enrichment before that data ever enters your core systems.

This approach (decoupling supplier onboarding from your internal PIM complexity) is the principle behind our own Sitation Portal solution. We designed it to solve this exact problem, creating a clean, managed data pipeline from your supply chain into whichever PIM systems need that data. Suppliers work in a familiar, guided environment while you maintain data quality and governance standards.

The inertia of existing processes isn’t just laziness; it’s often risk management. When something works, even imperfectly, the cost and risk of change need to be carefully weighed against the benefits.

Orchestration Models That Work

Building on the concepts from Part 2, let’s explore how organizations successfully orchestrate multiple PIMs:

Hub and Spoke Architecture

Think of this model like a kingdom with a central castle. The hub PIM acts as the single source of core truth – SKUs, basic attributes, foundational product data. The spokes are specialized outposts that enrich and adapt this core data for specific purposes. Critically, the flow of core data is primarily one-way: from hub to spokes.

The hub maintains data integrity and governance, while the spokes provide agility and specialization. This works particularly well when you have clear delineation between global and local responsibilities.

For example, we work with a global electronics manufacturer who maintains core technical specifications in their hub PIM. Regional spokes then add market-specific content, pricing, and promotional information. Each region can move at its own pace without compromising global data integrity. The hub’s specifications are law; the spokes add local color.

Federated Excellence

The federated model is fundamentally different – less like a kingdom, more like a council of equals. PIMs operate as peers, each with ultimate authority over its specific business domain. There’s no single master PIM. Instead, each system is the source of truth for its area of expertise.

This model shines when different business units have genuinely different needs. We see this often with conglomerates that operate across multiple industries.

One of our clients has more than 10 unique instances of their MDM solution for their major global markets – each operating largely autonomously, with some relatively loose integrations and automations. Why? That autonomy is critical to their operating model. Unique SKUs, content, languages, suppliers, relationships… it makes sense for them.

Success with federation requires strong governance and crystal-clear domain boundaries. But when done right, it provides maximum flexibility while maintaining necessary connections. The key is ensuring everyone knows which PIM owns what data – ambiguity is the enemy of federated architectures.

The Orchestration Engine: More Than Just APIs

An important insight: A multi-PIM architecture without a robust orchestration engine is just a collection of silos. The success of this strategy hinges on a powerful, intelligent layer that transforms multiple PIMs from a liability into a strategic asset. This is far more than moving data with APIs – it’s the strategic enabler that provides:

Business Process Orchestration which embeds your actual business logic into the data flow. When a new product is created in your hub PIM, the orchestration engine doesn’t just copy it around. It initiates parallel workflows: marketing gets a task in the brand PIM to add lifestyle content, the EU team gets notified to add regulatory data, and syndication waits until both are complete. This is business intelligence, not just integration.

Master Data Governance to make the engine the ultimate arbiter of truth. It enforces your architectural rules – like preventing regional PIMs from overwriting core technical specifications from the hub. When violations occur, it doesn’t just fail silently; it logs governance issues for review. This prevents the slow drift that kills data quality over time.

Intelligent Routing and Transformation to make sure the engine knows what data goes where and in what format. When a product gets assigned to “Outdoor” category, it automatically routes to the sporting goods syndication PIM. It transforms data on the fly – converting your internal “Navy Blue” to the marketplace’s required “Blue” format. This intelligence reduces manual work exponentially.

Cross-System Visibility to provide what no single PIM can: a complete view of your product data ecosystem’s health. When new products are taking 8 days to clear the EU PIM but only 2 days in the US, you’ve identified an operational bottleneck that would be invisible looking at individual systems. This is strategic business intelligence that drives real improvements.

Channel Analytics / Digital Shelf Analytics provide critical feedback loops to tell us how our products are performing in global marketplaces. This is critical in building feedback loops to drive continuous improvement in the merchandising operations which support their respective markets and channels.

The Financial Reality Check

Let’s talk numbers, because ultimately, this is a business decision. Yes, multiple PIMs mean multiple licenses, integration costs, and operational complexity. But the real ROI story is about value creation, not just cost management.

• Speed to Market drives revenue.
• M&A Synergy Acceleration unlocks trapped value.
• Channel-Specific Optimization increases conversion.
• Sandboxes and Independent Environments allow for innovation and experimentation, potentially providing useful insights and competitive advantages.

And it goes without saying that failures and delays can be very expensive. The cost of failed consolidation attempts (easily tens of millions of dollars at the global scale) can fund a sophisticated multi-PIM architecture for years. More importantly, the opportunity cost of consolidation delays and compromised capabilities often dwarfs the direct costs.

AI in the Multi-PIM World

Here’s something that might surprise you: As we sit here in 2025, I would make the argument that AI and automation often work better in a multi-PIM environment than in a monolithic one. Why? Specialization. Broad, global, generalized agentic AI holds amazing promise, but it’s not here yet. And until we can spin up 1,000+ virtual geniuses to manage all our data perfectly, we have to cherry pick. (And I promise I will come back to this statement in the future once AGI for PIM becomes a reality. Your guess is as good as mine when that is!)

In a single PIM, one AI model must understand everything from technical specifications to marketing copy to regulatory compliance. It’s a generalist by necessity, and generalists rarely excel. In a multi-PIM architecture, you can deploy specialized AI for specialized tasks:

Content Generation becomes more sophisticated. A central AI creates the master product narrative, then specialized agents adapt it: one fine-tuned for B2B technical documentation, another for lifestyle marketing content, a third for marketplace optimization. Each AI speaks the language of its domain fluently. This is a huge area of research and development for Sitation, and our industry-leading Draft content generation toolset helps dozens of global brands manage this complexity with outstanding results.

Quality Assurance gets smarter. The orchestration layer becomes the perfect place for AI-powered anomaly detection. When a product’s weight differs by 10x between the US and EU PIMs, AI should be able to flag it immediately. This cross-system intelligence would arguably be more difficult in a single PIM.

Automated Harmonization accelerates integration. When acquiring a company, ML models in your orchestration layer can analyze their PIM schema and suggest mappings to your architecture, potentially turning a six-month integration into a six-week project. Incidentally, this capability is core to our Root toolset within the Plezio suite.

The key insight is simple – in a multi-PIM world, AI doesn’t replace the complexity. It manages it intelligently.

The Multi-PIM Maturity Journey

Understanding where you are on the maturity curve helps determine your next steps. Here’s how organizations typically evolve:

Stage 1: Chaos (The Accidental Architecture – Technical Debt)

Multiple disconnected PIMs and shadow systems proliferate without design. Excel files, departmental databases, and “that person who knows everything” fill the gaps. Data is inconsistent, processes are manual, and ownership is unclear. If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Most large organizations start here. It’s messy.

Stage 2: Recognition (The Pain is Quantified)

Leadership acknowledges the problem. Costs become visible – not just licenses, but the hidden costs of inefficiency and missed opportunities. A project team / task force forms (remember our Fortune 500 retailer?). The initial instinct is often “consolidate everything,” but smarter organizations begin to question whether that’s the right goal.

Stage 3: Orchestration (The Intentional Architecture)

This is where transformation happens. Organizations choose their model (hub and spoke or federated) and implement a true orchestration engine. APIs replace spreadsheet exports. Governance bodies form. Data stewardship becomes a discipline.

This move mirrors the principles of modern composable commerce. Instead of relying on a monolithic PIM to do everything, businesses select best-of-breed systems for specific capabilities and connect them via an agile, API-first integration layer. The result is more flexible and powerful than any single system could be.

Hallelujah, we have a plan.

Stage 4: Optimization (The Intelligent Ecosystem)

The orchestration engine evolves with AI/ML capabilities. It doesn’t just move data – it improves it. Anomaly detection prevents errors before they propagate. Predictive analytics identify bottlenecks before they impact business. The architecture becomes “antifragile” (new vocabulary unlocked), absorbing new systems from acquisitions with minimal disruption and getting smarter along the way. This is where multi-PIM architecture – with intention – becomes a true competitive advantage.

Most organizations are somewhere between Stage 1 and Stage 2. The leaders are pushing into Stage 3. The innovators are glimpsing Stage 4.

Avoiding the Pitfalls

Success with multiple PIMs requires avoiding common traps:

Pitfall 1: Architectural Drift

The Problem: Different teams evolve their PIMs independently, slowly breaking connections and shared logic.

The Solution: Establish a PIM Center of Excellence that governs changes across all systems. Treat your orchestration configuration like code… version controlled, documented, and managed.

Pitfall 2: The Weakest Link Problem

The Problem: Poor data quality in one PIM contaminates the entire ecosystem.

The Solution: Implement data quality firewalls in your orchestration layer. Set minimum quality scores for data propagation. Quarantine bad data and alert source teams rather than spreading the problem.

Pitfall 3: Ownership Ambiguity

The Problem: When customer complaints arise, finger-pointing begins. “The website has the wrong price!” “That came from your PIM!”

The Solution: Create a clear RACI matrix defining which PIM owns which data domain. Use your orchestration engine’s audit logs to trace data lineage definitively. Ambiguity is the enemy of federated architectures.

Pitfall 4: Integration as an Afterthought

The Problem: Organizations focus on PIM selection but underinvest in the orchestration layer, resulting in brittle point-to-point connections.

The Solution: Budget for orchestration as a first-class citizen. It should be 30-40% of your total investment. This isn’t overhead; it’s the brain of your multi-PIM strategy.

Making the Strategic Choice

So how do you decide whether multiple PIMs make sense for your organization?

Start by honestly assessing your business complexity. If you operate in multiple industries, serve vastly different customer segments, or have strong regional variations, consolidation might be fighting against your business model rather than supporting it.

Consider your channel strategy. If you’re pushing products through dozens of different channels with unique requirements, specialized PIMs might serve you better than a generalist platform.

Evaluate your organizational structure and culture. Highly centralized organizations might succeed with consolidation where federated organizations would struggle. There’s no universal right answer.

Think about your growth strategy. If you grow through acquisition, maintaining PIM flexibility might be essential. If you grow organically in aligned markets, consolidation might make more sense.

Finally, assess your technical maturity. Orchestrating multiple PIMs requires sophisticated integration capabilities and strong governance. If you lack these capabilities, consolidation might be the more practical path, at least initially.

The Path Forward

At Sitation, we’ve guided dozens of organizations through these decisions. We’ve seen the failures that come from dogmatic approaches, both forced consolidation and unmanaged proliferation. We’ve also seen the successes that come from thoughtful, strategic PIM architecture design.

The key is recognizing that there’s no universal answer. Your PIM architecture should reflect your business architecture. Sometimes that means one PIM. Sometimes it means several. Most often, it means thoughtfully orchestrated systems that work together to support your unique needs.

Next Steps

The most sophisticated organizations are no longer just PIM administrators. They’re the strategic architects of their product information ecosystems. They understand that in a world of composable commerce, AI specialization, and rapid market evolution, the ability to orchestrate multiple best-of-breed systems isn’t a compromise. It’s a superpower, and it reflects the reality of complex global business.

I want to be clear – this is huge value in moving toward true centralization! This is not to disparage the strategy – in fact it’s a core offering at Sitation. But the reality is that frequently means sunsetting redundant systems and being strategic in the system design, while acknowledging the need for supporting local needs. In practice, “consolidated” frequently looks more like the hub and spoke or federated models discussed above.

The real question isn’t whether you’ll manage multiple PIMs. Most likely, you already do, whether you admit it or not. The question is whether you’ll do it strategically or accidentally!
Ready to move from accidental architecture to intentional orchestration? Let’s discuss how to transform your product information complexity into competitive advantage.

---

Next up – we conclude this 4-part series by exploring how the importance of planning ahead for the role PIM will play in a rapidly changing e-commerce landscape.