Last month, CosmeticsDesign attended a webinar hosted by California-based software company Knowde regarding its Product Master Data (PMD) and Product Information Management (PIM) software, and its potential implications in supporting the cosmetic and personal care product manufacturer and supplier industries.
As shared by Knowde, one if the biggest challenges facing these industries “while trying to achieve successful digital transformation is the ability to organize and digitize online product data.”
As many suppliers and manufacturers have outdated or unavailable product data, this issue is further exacerbated when companies are unable to offer an accurate digital product catalogue on their websites, provide internal sales teams with the information they need to convert sales, and can potentially disrupt internal team’s processes with CRMs and other organizational needs.
To learn more about how digital PMD and PIM software like Knowde can improve the processes and strategies of cosmetics and personal care product manufacturers and suppliers, the pain points PMD and PIM software can address, and how PMD and PIM software can support cosmetics and personal care product manufacturers through the implementation of MoCRA regulations in the coming years, CosmeticsDesign interviewed Ali Amin-Javaheri, CEO of Knowde and Janakiraman Swamy, Chief Knowledge Officer of Knowde for their insights.
CDU: In what ways can PIM software like Knowde support manufacturers and suppliers to the cosmetics and personal care product industries?
Ali Amin-Javaheri, CEO of Knowde: Most supplier and distributor websites fail to meet the needs of today’s formulators, cosmetic scientists, and buyers who want a better way to find the ingredients they need online. This leads companies to miss out on sales opportunities. Knowde’s PMD and PIM solution gives suppliers and distributors product data that is comprehensive, accurate, and up-to-date.
This is the first step towards enabling modern, online customer experiences that empower cosmetic and personal care companies to speed up research and get products to market faster.
With clean data being sent into their internal systems, suppliers and distributors are able to leverage investments made in CRM, ERP, and other systems, because they are equipping their sales, marketing, operations, supply chain, and regulatory and compliance teams to do their jobs efficiently and effectively.
CDU: What are some of the most significant pain points facing these industries regarding product data digitization?
Janakiraman Swamy, Chief Knowledge Officer of Knowde: Disorganized product data is a difficult problem to solve, because the information is kept in many different formats and spread across organizations. It might be siloed by region, market, and business system, or trapped in PDFs, spreadsheets and SharePoint drives with no central source of truth for the data.
Some suppliers and distributors have invested large amounts of budget, created strategies, and built teams to address the challenges presented by disorganized product data. But figuring out how to get unstructured product data out of static documents or distributed systems, then structure it, cleanse it, normalize it, put it into a hierarchy, and get all of it into a unified taxonomy, is not core a competency for chemical companies.
Most companies don’t have the expertise or resources in-house to accomplish what they need to, and while there may be solutions available in the market, none are designed to handle the product complexity and scale of our industry.
CDU: In what ways does a PIM software like Knowde address and solve these issues?
Ali Amin-Javaheri, CEO of Knowde: Since we launched Knowde, our objective has been to digitally transform our industry. We knew we had to start by solving the main problem holding the industry back, which was to design the software and classification systems needed to digitize product data.
We assembled a team of chemical engineers, taxonomists, software engineers, and data scientists to build AI-driven technology that can extract, organize, and unify any company’s product data in a matter of weeks. No matter how many products a supplier or distributor has, we can cleanse their data, deduplicate information, and classify every attribute and product using a single, unified taxonomy and get it into a PIM system so customers and internal teams can view and engage with the entire portfolio.
CDU: How can a software platform like Knowde support manufacturers and suppliers to the cosmetics and personal care product industries through the implementation of MoCRA regulations which will start rolling out at the end of this year?
Janakiraman Swamy, Chief Knowledge Officer of Knowde: The search capabilities of our PMD and PIM solution are powered by Knowde’s proprietary taxonomy, which is unmatched anywhere in the industry. We’ve built market-specific filters that help users concentrate on products that best match their needs, whether they’re searching by chemical name, market, function, or technology.
For the cosmetic and personal care industry, it’s possible to search by ingredient origin, benefit and labeling claims, chemical inventories, and certifications and compliance.
As companies update their product data to add information pertaining to the guidelines of the Modernization of Cosmetics Regulation Act of 2022 (MoCRA), it will be searchable on our platform.
CDU: Are there any future plans in development regarding Knowde software specifically catering to the needs of manufacturers and suppliers to cosmetics and personal care product companies?
Ali Amin-Javaheri, CEO of Knowde: Knowde has an ambitious goal to bring the entire chemical industry into the digital world. We’re constantly looking for ways to evolve the tools that enable customers to search, discover, learn, request, communicate, and transact online with suppliers better and faster than ever.
Throughout the year, we launch new products and features based on the input of the sellers and buyers who use Knowde, including many that will directly benefit the cosmetics and personal care industry. We introduce those new features quarterly through our Knowde Kinetic webinars.
CDU: Is there anything suppliers and manufacturers to the cosmetics and personal care product industries should know or consider regarding the digitization of product information data?
Ali Amin-Javaheri, CEO of Knowde: Suppliers and distributors that deliver the modern, online experience that customers want will unlock new revenue streams, create sustainable paths to growth, and give themselves a competitive advantage over companies that are struggling with outdated websites.
Knowde has spent the past five years working with more than 8,000 suppliers to establish a battle-tested PMD and PIM solution that enables instant, customer-facing digital transformation.
