Products and Services

Product Data Manager

Clear Data for Selling Confidence, Spot On Pricing and Accurate Orders

FPX is often approached by companies that are using outdated tools for maintaining product data and price sheets. They are struggling to understand, manage and rapidly distribute updated, accurate product information and pricing that exists in disparate locations and formats to salespeople and channel partners with little success resulting in rework and lost margins.
 

FPX was founded on the principle that people need to be equipped with on-the-spot, clear and accurate product data and pricing every step of the way to confidently answer customer questions, provide perfect quotes and execute flawless orders.

FPX Product Data Manager™ (PDM) replaces outdated tools to become the central knowledge repository for product data and pricing. Our PDM creates data sets—essentially an intelligent product catalog—that can be published and made instantly available to all salespeople and partners. Product updates and new product rollouts are simplified through this simultaneous data availability.

The tasking of a company to adopt a new central data management tool to drive its sales effort is not trivial. FPX eases transition to our PDM through the use of powerful data import tools that allow for a repeatable import process. Data can be harvested from multiple locations as often as needed. Product and option order codes, descriptions, prices, and any other required attributes, plus the business rules that drive the product configuration, are gathered from existing sources within an organization.

FPX has developed an easy to learn, yet powerful, syntax for configuration data. For example, if Option A is available only when Product A is selected, the data entry person would simply type “Product A” as the data for Option A’s Rule attribute. This is much simpler to type and maintain than a code-like statement such as “Option A When Product A is Selected”. While there are certainly more complex rules, the concept of minimizing the size of rules is used throughout the configuration data whether it’s a compatibility rule, pricing level rule, etc. Data entry personnel do not need to be programmers.

At run time, the FPX configuration engine validates each product and option selection made by the end user to ensure the configuration does not contain errors. As a result, FPX is able to provide 100% accurate data to an order entry system. Companies immediately see a return on their FPX investment just through the cost savings that come from having accurate orders.
 

Companies that use FPX Product Data Manager experience:

• An easy to use interface.
• Ability to handle complex products with thousands of options.
• Opportunity to import data from common data sources and XML files.
• A data model that is flexible to allow a wide range of customer needs.
• Data that is published as a single compact file for fast deployment.
• Built-in backup and versioning tools.
• A reliable audit trail that records all changes made to the database.
• A simple testing interface that allows the data to be tested to ensure it behaves as expected.
• A controlled data view environment where users work with only the data they are authorized to view or edit.