There are few setbacks which frustrate commercial teams more than delays in product launch. Your marketing campaigns are lined up and ready to go, demand is building, …but the products can’t go live because the product data isn’t ready. This isn’t just a pain in the neck, but a direct punch in the gut for revenue opportunities, your brand’s reputation, and even the morale of your teams. According to renowned industry analyst, Gartner, only 55% of product launches take place on schedule. The root causes? Quite predictable, really: Messy supplier files, missing attributes, teams operating in siloes, and a prolific use of outdated manual processes.
Our article looks further into the damage caused by product launch delays – the why and how. But we also bring good news – If you adopt the right systems and approach, delays don’t need to be inevitable anymore. In fact, they’re easily preventable.
The hidden bottlenecks: Inconsistent files, missing attributes, scattered images
Delays often begin well before the product page is supposed to go live. Suppliers send data in every format imaginable: Excel spreadsheets with mismatched headers, PDFs full of unstructured text, or image files scattered across emails and shared drives. Critical attributes are missing entirely (think: dimensions, compatibility, or material composition), while high-res product photos arrive late, in the wrong formats, or …not at all.
This patchwork creates chaos and disorder. Teams spend weeks simply trying to standardise data inputs before they can even think about enriching product content. It’s the equivalent of building a house on sand because if the foundations aren’t consistent, everything built on top will easily collapse.
A never-ending manual grind: chasing up, rekeying, and chronic firefighting
In the absence of a clear governance framework or automated workflow tasks, your commercial and product data teams are press-ganged into a manual purgatory. Spreadsheets need to be reformatted by hand. Product details require re-keying multiple times into ERP, eCommerce, and marketplace systems. Your people chase suppliers, sometimes fruitlessly, for missing data across endless email chains.
In the meantime – we’re only human after all – errors start creeping in. It could be incorrect SKUs, mismatched images, or inconsistent units to name three. What ought to be a seamless upstream process becomes a micro-crisis culture where your highly skilled (and highly-paid) staff are reduced to wasting time trouble-shooting when you want them focused on strategic growth initiatives. The outcomes are sadly predictable: Bottlenecks proliferate, timelines slip, and overall confidence in the process erodes over time.
Impact on the business: Missed windows, lost momentum, and dissatisfied customers
When you fail to hit a launch date, it’s an expensive miss, and the fallout is immediate:
- Seasonal sales windows close
- Paid campaigns lose their punch
- Competitors seize the advantage
- Customers, primed for a new product, are left disappointed
In fact, these customers inevitably turn elsewhere to satisfy their needs. Internally, staff morale plummets. Teams under pressure underperform or burn out. Budgets overrun. Managers face difficult conversations with stakeholders.
A launch delay isn’t just an issue of rescheduling; it’s revenue lost, a blow to brand credibility, and a strategic setback.
The super-fix: smarter onboarding and centralised product data governance
The cure for chronic launch delays lies in moving from ad-hoc, manual processes to structured, technology-enabled workflows. The four key pillars driving this enhanced product data management are:
1. Supplier data onboarding with SKU Launch
SKU Launch gives suppliers a user-friendly, standardised portal to submit product data. Templates and rules ensure that all required attributes and formats are completed at source. Automated validation catches any missing details instantly, while ingestion tools transform messy PDFs and spreadsheets into clean, structured data. The outcome is fewer errors, less chasing down missing attributes, and high-quality product data, usable from day one.
2. A PIM as the single source of truth
Once the product data is clean, a Product Information Management (PIM) system takes over the heavy lifting. Acting as a centralised hub, a PIM stores, enriches, and governs product data, eliminating departmental silos and constant struggles with version control. Automated workflows manage approvals, compliance checks, and enrichment tasks. With a PIM, teams work in parallel on the same set of accurate data, drastically reducing time to market.
3. Automation and AI-powered acceleration
Modern PIMs and onboarding tools are increasingly augmented by AI. From auto-categorising SKUs to extracting specs from supplier documents and generating first-draft descriptions, AI accelerates the tedious and time-consuming work, leaving teams free to focus on their own specialisms.
4. Cross-functional alignment
However, let’s be clear – tools only solve half the problem. What matters equally as much are processes and people. Accountability is a key factor and, to enable it, you need to implement a couple of foundational measures:
- Clear governance policies defining who owns, validates, and approves data
- Shared dashboards and workflows to align marketing, eCommerce, and operations so nothing gets stuck waiting for “the other lot.”
Working in harmony, SKU Launch and PIM transform the sorry situation of weeks of firefighting into mere days of streamlined progress. Instead of a wild scramble to fix last-minute launch problems, your people can focus on the commercial differentials: hitting windows, scaling faster, and building enduring trust in your brand among customers.
Final words
Speed is a differentiator in today’s competitive market. Agility and responsiveness are no longer just buzzwords. Chronic launch delays are no longer inevitable; If they’re still occurring, they’re the symptoms of poor processes and outdated tools. By onboarding suppliers through SKU Launch, centralising governance in a PIM, and embracing automation, businesses can transform product launches from frustrating and damaging bottlenecks into significant competitive advantages.
Get in touch with us today and we can discuss in more depth how we can partner with you to overhaul and enhance your product launches with our expertise in PIM implementation and our own SKULaunch platform. We’ll get you to where your launches need to be – on time, on message and on brand.