Keeping your company’s product data secure and under control is of paramount importance and something we don’t take lightly here at Agility Multichannel.
Agility PIM’s Data Governance controls establish, maintain and enforce high-level policies and procedures. Our Data Stewardship focuses on what’s happening day-to-day. Together they form the tenacious backbone that will keep your product data safe and consistent and your processes incorruptible.
While many systems restrict these tools to IT, at Agility Multichannel we recognize that IT is often short on resources. Because we don’t want people to have to wait around for new attributes to be added, we’ve made Agility’s Governance and Stewardship functionality available to system administrators and other business users. After all, time is an asset that few companies can afford to lose.
Agility Governance addresses critical areas such as defining data elements and building master hierarchies. It lets you determine what each user can do and what they have access to, and can be used to configure custom user interfaces for departments, groups or individuals. It also controls workflow so that products can be routed through a defined set of stages, triggering notifications to stakeholders when they have tasks to perform.
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Data Modeling and Rules
With Agility Product Management for Commerce, all set structures, hierarchies, and rules can be configured and adapted to the specific requirements of your company.
Agility’s advanced, flexible data model lets you create complex product data hierarchies, allocating them into groups and categories. This structure is then configurable to follow standard classification models or according to your own categorization terms. Data inheritance and assignment is easily achieved. Attributes can be assigned to product categories where associated products can automatically inherit these attribute definitions. This capability, in conjunction with built-in validation rules, ensures a simple, streamlined user process and data that is reliably accurate and flawlessly consistent.
Agility Governance Feature Spotlights
- “Choice lists” (with single or multiple choice options) can be assigned to attributes as an alternative to manually entering values, guaranteeing consistency and ensuring that when a visitor to your website performs a parametric-based search they’ll quickly find every relevant product meeting their criteria. The impact on sales and customer loyalty is direct and dramatic.
- With Agility Governance, you can automatically generate special characters such as the trademark symbol (®). Every output channel treats these characters differently; catching and formatting them manually is a painstaking job that can consume an inordinate amount of your team’s resources. Agility’s look-up function does the code transformations automatically, saving valuable time and effort.
- “Agility Styles” lets you create style mapping for InDesign, QuarkXPress, HTML, etc., so you only have to apply the style to text once to have it come out appropriately everywhere.
Workflow
With Agility, business process management is a way of life. Creating and enforcing workflows is exquisitely simple.
Agility lets you assign workflows to any object, whether it’s a product, a group, a section, an image or even an individual attribute. Using a simple wizard, data stewards and administrators can determine the steps included in each workflow, assigning resources to each one and determining how the owners of the steps will be notified – i.e., through a “to do” list or an email or both. Agility can even interact with other systems through workflow.
When an object – for instance, a new image – is created, Agility Workflow is automatically initiated. Users are notified the moment they log in to Agility. At any time, product managers can view the current status of any project, even if they’re away from the office, via a dashboard on their iPad or other device. As each task is completed, the user pushes workflow to the next stage, person or group in line, triggering a notification. Agility ensures a steady, predictable flow in the life cycles of products, assets and all other objects.
We’ve built automation into all aspects of Agility Workflow. For example, product approval can trigger export of associated product information to a website or any other channel. One workflow can be prompted or triggered by another, and all workflows can be defined to limit user access or functionality.
Security
With Agility’s Governance module, data stewards and administrators can lock down the system, so that only authorized users can access valuable data.
Login credentials can be assigned to allow access to specified objects or categories, right down to the attribute level. For added security, Agility Governance lets administrators control individual user functionality, via the workflow module. For example, an end-user may be granted authority to edit a product description only until that defined, singular task is completed and workflow is triggered to move it to the next stage, when those credentials are automatically rescinded.
Agility’s Data Integration (DI) Module has numerous tools for securing the integrity of incoming data. Agility DI not only connects to other systems to facilitate secure information transfer but mandates conformity with your company’s formatting, content and validation criteria. You can create your own set of rules to determine how the data is carried in and reject any that doesn’t meet your requirements. Even attributes themselves can have dedicated validation rules applied to govern the data that goes into them.
Audit Trail: For Peace of Mind
To prevent the kind of breaches that can occur even with the tightest security measures in place, Agility provides an Attribute History feature to store every amended attribute value. Authorized users have easy access to view all versions, dates, times and user names. Former values can be restored at the click of a button.