Implementing product database solutions helps businesses to cut costs and improve purchasing, production and sales processes.
This means:

• Faster provision of information for new products
• Immediate communication of product changes
• Consistent information for each target medium and customer group with improved data quality
• Improved profit margins through well-coordinated sales and marketing activities
• Easier integration of suppliers, customers and business partners through coordinated electronic product catalogues
• Reduction of costs, time and errors by producing print catalogues with information from the database
• Efficient solution setup through preconfigured basic settings,
  easy customisation and integration with associated IT systems
• Location-independent access to all system data using web-based software.
  For these tasks, Lobster_pim has a company-wide product information and catalogue-management software platform. It offers a centralised, structured product information system which contains powerful modules for the following tasks:
• Central product data management
• Import of basic data and comparison with ERP systems such as SAP, ORACLE, Navision etc.
• Dynamic structuring of information
• Classification management (optional)
• Versioning
• Comprehensive search functions
• Document and image management

The beating heart of our product information management solution is a centralised, media-neutral product data management system. The central product data source is aligned with partial data sets in other systems (e.g. ERP), in order to guarantee consistent, company-wide information. The system also makes edited product information available for use within various target systems, for example for e-commerce, websites, CD-ROMs or the production of printed catalogues. Fig. 1 outlines the individual steps: acquisition, maintenance, planning and publication.

It is essential that relationships between product data sets are structured dynamically in order to ensure accessibility and visibility. As such, Lobster_pim allows for the multidimensional structuring of data.

All customer-specific imports and exports can be easily integrated within the standard user interface via a configuration file and accessed from said file.

Imports can generate new structures, create attribute values ​​or simply update existing data.

Incremental imports are possible. Lobster_pim offers the following import options:

• Import data from CSV, TAB text, Excel files or tables from SQL databases
• Importing texts and pictures
• The mass import function enables users to import entire directories with pictures and texts all at once. By analysing the file name of the individual text or image, the object can be assigned directly to the product.

Exports

• Excel / CSV export without configuration. An Excel spreadsheet or CSV file can be generated in the edit mode from a selection of products. The exported  attributes can be restricted using filters. This means that any user can easily create short-term data for a report, which can even contain product images.
• Configured Excel / CSV export. More complex exports can be configured and made available in a menu which is accessible to all users (rights-dependent).
• SQL export. Exports data from Lobster_pim to any SQL database (JDBC driver must be available). The export can either be configured based on the project, or processed as a “generic export”, a standardised output that is independent of customer-specific data structures and can be processed by downstream systems.
• BMEcat export. Products and structures can be exported as a BMEcat file.
• Lobster_shop export. Specifically tailored to meet the needs of our shops. Search filters and complex data structures can easily be configured. Standard product ranges and marketing campaigns can be connected with minimal configuration necessary.
• PDF export. For each product selected, the images, set attribute values ​​(with attribute names) and texts can be exported as PDF files. The first page of the PDF file is a table of contents and the design of the PDF file can be customised. The result is an easily generated PDF product datasheet.
• Export texts. This feature exports all texts that are subordinate to the selected node in the product tree. Can be formatted as HTML CSS.
• Export images. This feature exports previews created by Lobster_pim when importing images.
• The template-based export. Provides an export interface for any text-based output format (e.g. HTML, LATEX) as well as PDFs, via the integration of FOP.
• Export group names. This feature allows all group names in the current product tree
  to be exported as Excel spreadsheets for translation.