When product information travels, what gets lost along the way?

The problem with product information is rarely that there is not enough of it.

The real challenge is what happens to the information between the manufacturer and the customer.

I spent years working for a large international product manufacturer with premium products and brands, service operations, spare parts, product training, marketing and sales. There was certainly no shortage of product information.

Still, getting the right information to the right place was surprisingly difficult.

The same product information had to be collected, adapted and reformatted again and again for different markets, retailers, languages, target groups and use cases. A retailer needed one set of information, another retailer wanted almost the same information in a different format, and a third had its own classifications and terminology.

When I joined Solteq, one of my first thoughts was that the world needs a supplier portal.

It did not take very long to realise that it is not quite that simple.

What companies really need are better ways to share product information.

Product information starts with the people who know the product

For a manufacturer, product information is much more than a set of technical attributes.

Behind it are years of product development, testing, material expertise, manufacturing knowledge, service experience and commercial decisions. Product information explains why a certain material was chosen, why a product is designed in a particular way, how it should be maintained and why it may cost more than another seemingly similar product.

This knowledge is valuable, but transforming it into usable product information for different channels, partners and audiences is another challenge altogether.

In practice, even companies with good systems and established processes still do a surprising amount of manual work. Data is copied between systems, product descriptions are rewritten, spreadsheets are completed, classifications are interpreted and missing details are requested from different parts of the organisation.

Some of this work requires expertise and always will. The problem starts when the same routine tasks have to be repeated over and over again.

Every additional manual step increases the risk of errors, delays and small changes in meaning.

And those small changes accumulate.

Product information does not travel in a straight line

A product manufacturer rarely sends information directly to the end customer.

The information may pass through subcontractors, importers, distributors, retailers, ecommerce platforms, marketplaces, service networks and authorities. Different parties add information, remove information, rename fields or reshape the data to fit their own systems.

This is why I find the idea of a supplier ecosystem more useful than thinking only about individual supplier relationships.

The challenge is not simply transferring product information from one company to another. It is maintaining the quality and meaning of that information while it moves through the ecosystem.

Ideally, the same original information should not have to be recreated separately for every recipient.

In reality, that still happens a lot.

Too much information is rarely the real problem

There is sometimes a concern that customers are shown too much product information.

My experience is the opposite.

The more common problem is that an important detail is missing, difficult to find or presented in a way that makes products hard to compare.

For one customer, the deciding factor may be where a material comes from. Another may care about spare parts and serviceability. Someone else needs to know energy consumption, compatibility, dimensions or the type of electrical connection.

It is very difficult for a manufacturer or retailer to predict which individual detail will finally make or break the purchase decision.

In a physical store, a knowledgeable salesperson may be able to answer the missing question. Online, the customer usually has to rely on whatever information is available on the product page.

If the information is incomplete, the consequences may only become visible after the purchase. The product does not fit the intended use, expectations are not met, or the customer discovers a limitation that could have been communicated earlier.

Product information therefore has another purpose besides selling.

It helps the customer make the right decision.

The manufacturer and retailer look at the same product differently

From a product information perspective, manufacturers and retailers often want very similar things.

Both benefit from accurate and current information. Both want products to be easy to manage. Both need regulatory requirements to be met. And both benefit when customers understand what they are buying.

But their perspectives are different.

The manufacturer tends to know the product in depth and may want to communicate a large amount of detail. The retailer needs consistency across a large assortment, often supplied by hundreds or thousands of manufacturers.

That naturally leads to standardisation.

The retailer defines mandatory attributes, classifications, image requirements, units of measurement and data structures. The manufacturer then adapts its information to those requirements.

The difficulty is that a retailer's data model cannot always capture everything the manufacturer considers important.

A manufacturer may have a great deal of knowledge about product durability, serviceability, material choices or particular use cases, but there may simply be no suitable place for that information in the retailer's structure.

This is one of the areas where product differentiation can gradually disappear.

Different products start to look more alike than they really are.

And if the customer cannot see the difference, it becomes much more difficult for a brand to justify why its product is better or more expensive.

Supplier collaboration should reduce friction, not create more of it

This is where supplier portals and other supplier collaboration solutions can help.

But only if they solve an actual problem.

A supplier portal that simply gives the manufacturer another form to complete may actually make things worse. The manufacturer already has the product information somewhere. Asking people to manually type it into another system is not much of an improvement.

Ideally, product information, documents, images, videos, manuals, sustainability information, compliance data and logistics information can be shared in a structured way and reused by different parties.

The receiving organisation can then transform the information for its own channels and needs without forcing the supplier to recreate the same content repeatedly.

There is no single technical solution that works for every company.

For one organisation, a supplier portal may mainly be about supplier master data. For another, the main issue is collecting product information and documents. In some cases, the solution may be closely connected to a PIM system, while in others the important part is data syndication or supplier onboarding.

The terminology is less important than the result.

Does the solution make it easier to provide correct information?

Does it reduce duplicated work?

Does it make responsibilities clearer?

Can the same trusted information be reused instead of recreated?

Those are more useful questions than whether the solution fits a particular definition of a supplier portal.

Regulation adds another layer

There is also another reason why supplier collaboration is becoming more important.

Product information increasingly needs to serve regulatory requirements in addition to sales and customer experience.

A new requirement rarely means simply adding one new field to a product database.

The required information may originate from product development, sourcing, manufacturing, quality management or external suppliers. Someone needs to collect it, verify it, maintain it and eventually make it available to customers, retailers or authorities.

The EU's Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation, PPWR, is one current example.

At first glance, it may look mainly like a packaging and logistics issue. From an information management perspective, however, companies also need to know more about packaging materials, recyclability and compliance.

When a company has thousands of products and works with a large supplier and retailer network, this becomes an ecosystem-level information problem.

The information is rarely created in one place.

The better companies are able to share and maintain trusted information between organisations, the less painful each new requirement becomes.

Not everything should be automated

When discussing product information, it is easy to assume that the goal should be to automate everything.

I do not think that is realistic or even desirable.

There are many situations where human expertise is essential. Someone needs to understand what the information means, whether it is correct and whether something important is missing.

At the same time, highly skilled people should not spend their time repeatedly copying information from one spreadsheet to another or answering the same product information request for the fifth time.

The useful question is where human expertise adds value and where systems can handle routine collection, validation and sharing.

At their best, PIM systems, supplier portals and other product information solutions make the knowledge of experienced people available to the wider organisation instead of keeping it in personal files, email threads or people's heads.

And then there is AI

AI has made product information more visible as a topic, and for good reason.

AI can help classify, enrich, translate and validate product information. It can help identify gaps and make large amounts of information easier to use.

But the quality of the outcome still depends on the quality of the underlying information.

AI does not know why a particular material was selected, how a product behaves after ten years of use or which technical detail makes one version more suitable than another unless that knowledge exists somewhere in a usable form.

That knowledge originates with the people who develop, manufacture, test, sell and maintain the product.

My colleague Mikko Helin has written about how product data is becoming an increasingly important competitive factor in commerce , particularly as AI and digital channels influence which products are found and recommended. In another article, he looked at how AI forms its understanding of companies and products from their wider digital footprint .

I agree with both observations.

This article looks at the same issue from the other end of the chain.

Before product information becomes part of an ecommerce site, marketplace, search result or AI-generated recommendation, it has already travelled through several systems and organisations.

The more often that information is copied, converted and interpreted, the greater the possibility that something useful disappears along the way.

That is why the original product information still matters so much.

Not because every customer needs to see every piece of information a manufacturer has, but because good digital product information can only be built from reliable original knowledge.

And someone has to make sure that knowledge survives the journey.