Data Pools and PIM: The future of supplier data exchange in B2B

In the good old days, when it was just a couple of you running the start-up, supplier data used to mean a few spreadsheets and a relatively tame EDI feed. Fast forward to now, and, counterintuitively, your growth has become a curse. You’re juggling thousands of SKUs, global partners, regulatory attributes, and multiple digital channels which expect everything to be right, first time,…everywhere.

In this brave new world, the “send us a sheet and we’ll sort it” approach to your supplier data exchange just doesn’t hack it anymore. For those businesses who know they want to grow in a strategically manageable way, Data pools and Product Information Management (PIM) solutions are becoming the defining architecture behind how B2B product content actually moves – and who actually controls it.

Why supplier data exchange is under pressure

Demands from all directions have changed faster than most operating models:

• More channels: e-commerce, marketplaces, procurement portals, content hubs.
• More data: technical specs, compliance and ESG fields, images, CAD, translations.
• More partners: manufacturers, distributors, buying groups, and data intermediaries.

Manual onboarding and point-to-point integrations cannot deal with this state of affairs adequately because they inevitably create:

• Time-to-market delays: products sitting in a “data queue” instead of live in your catalogue.
• Inconsistent content: different versions of the same product across ERP, web, and partner feeds.
• Compliance risk: missing or misaligned data for standards, safety, or local regulation.

Therefore, the question merchants of all stripes should be asking themselves now is no longer “where do we store the data?” but “how do we exchange product data cleanly, repeatedly, and at scale?”.

Data pools: What are they really for?

Data pools sit outside your organisation, acting as shared, standards-based repositories. The archetypal examples are GS1/GDSN data pools in retail, food, and healthcare.

They are designed to:

• Standardise: enforce a common model (e.g. GS1 Global Data Model) so all parties use the same core attributes, codes, and units.
• Synchronise: use a publish/subscribe model so suppliers publish once, and subscribed trading partners receive consistent updates.
• Assure compliance: support regulatory and trading requirements around identifiers, packaging hierarchies, ingredients, or safety information.

Data pools are excellent at keeping baseline data aligned across a network. However, they aren’t built to:

• Manage your full enriched content (storytelling copy, SEO, local imagery).
• Run internal workflows for approvals and governance.
• Act as the master for every channel-specific variant of your content.

…which is where a PIM system comes into its own.

PIM as the internal engine of supplier data

If the data pool is the public square, your PIM is the command centre. It sits between your internal systems (ERP, PLM, MDM) and every outbound channel, including data pools.

A modern PIM for B2B covers four areas of activity particularly well:

1. Ingesting from everywhere
   • Importing from ERP, PLM, legacy tools, supplier feeds, and data pools.
   • Normalising non-standard/specialist formats and labels into your internal data model.
2. Standardising and enriching
   • Applying your taxonomy, mandatory attributes, and controlled vocabularies.
   • Adding marketing copy, translations, rich media, CAD, manuals, and ESG fields.
3. Governing quality and compliance
   • Enforcing completeness and validation rules before anything is published.
   • Maintaining audit trails for who changed what and when, essential for statutory safety information and regulation-heavy sectors.

4. Syndicating outwards
   • Generating channel-ready feeds for eCommerce, marketplaces, partner portals, print catalogues along with pushing correctly structured subsets back into data pools using GS1, GDSN, ETIM, BMEcat or other standards.

Basically, data pools keep trading networks aligned, whilst PIM keeps your business, multiple channels, and brand voice aligned.

So, you need both.

From batch files to real-time data networks

The behind-the-scenes technical plumbing is shifting too. Batch uploads and once-a-month catalogue drops are giving way to API-first, event-driven exchange. Basically, these terms mean:

• API-First: Decoupling the backend (‘back office’) data from the frontend (customer-facing), allowing a PIM to connect to any website, app, or marketplace without being restricted by a specific user interface.

• Event-Driven: Using “triggers” (webhooks) so that as soon as a product is enriched or approved, the information flows instantly to downstream systems like sales channels.

The beneficial outcomes?

• APIs alongside Electronic Data Interchange: EDI is still important for orders and invoices, but APIs are much more suitable for dynamic data  (in the form of rich, frequently changing product content).

• Event-driven updates: changes in PIM (new product, updated attribute, expired certificate) are able to emit events which update web stores, partners, and data pools in practically real time.
• Streaming and observability: real-time data analytics can show where a product is out of sync across systems, so you can fix the data once at source instead of having to do it manually across every channel.

For B2B merchants, a future-proofed product data network looks like this:

• PIM at the centre, as the system of engagement for product content.
• Strategic connections to relevant data pools to meet standards and customer information demands.
• APIs and EDI as the ‘wiring’ carrying those updates around your ecosystem.

Towards a product data exchange model

To make this a sustainable, long-term-oriented model, market-leading merchants of all types are moving to a more formal data exchange model for product information.

Among the most important guiding principles:

• Security and trust: role-based access, encryption, and audit logs for every exchange.
• Standardisation: using agreed models (such as GS1, ETIM, ISO/STEP-style protocols in technical sectors) so partners will interpret attributes in the same way.
• Clear ownership: internal organisation-wide clarity on which system is the system of record for each attribute, and which subset is shared via which route (direct PIM feeds vs data pools).
• Bi-directional flows: this pulls corrections, new attributes, or improved assets from suppliers and partners back into the PIM, rather than simply pushing data out.

The cherry on the icing is that once those rules are in place, automated tasks do the large part of the grunt work.

The implications for B2B suppliers and distributors

In practical terms, the future of best practices for supplier data exchange will involve:

• Using data pools where mandated or commercially advantageous, to stay aligned with customers and industry standards.
• Using PIM as the technology layer which orchestrates this range of tasks and workflows:  Cleaning, enriching, governing, and syndicating product content across every channel.

Automating onboarding so internal teams can avoid having to act as ‘human middleware’ between supplier spreadsheets and your catalogue.

Final words

At Start with Data, our substantial experience with all kinds of clients has shown us how the real pressure point is very often that of supplier onboarding. That’s precisely why we developed SKULaunch, our AI-powered supplier data onboarding service. It can:

• Map supplier files to your model.
• Clean and standardises attributes.
• Feed ready-to-publish data straight into your PIM and on to data pools and channels. 

Get in touch with us today and we can talk further about how to connect PIM with data pools and modern data exchange models and how Start with Data and SKULaunch can help you automate your supplier onboarding and governance.