The manufacturing company I worked for at the beginning of my career had a couple of information management problems. The problem’s core was organizing all the product data and working with production, accounting, inventory management, costing, and other functions. I had a mentor at the time unaware to me who pushed the VP of Product Development to bring me over from the production position I had to organize data.
It’s a long story (TL;DR), but by the end of my time there (some pretty massive layoffs with the recession of 1980 and other stuff) I had been slotted for an IT leadership post and (in today’s terms) digitized the lot of it.
It was not out of ignorance that it happened that I interviewed the president of a Product Information Company newly spun off from a university group.
Since it takes more than one company to make a market, I heard about another company in the market. Viamedici was established in 1999 successfully completing more than 300 PIM/MDM projects since. Where I assembled a totally manual system, current state of the computing art allows Viamedici to implement projects with upwards of a billion records and 46.6 million records in-memory data.
Today’s conversation linked me with CEO Juergen Mueller who ran me through the company’s portfolio of products and services. The key proposition is high scalability and flexibility. The company has been moving to “Data-as-a-Service” on its own cloud or also on AWS or Azure.
Viamedici is privately held and has offices in the US, Germany, China and Japan with a partner network in place to support its global client base. The company’s portfolio covers all product management and marketing processes. At the center of the portfolio lies the product information management suite Viamedici EPIM, comprised of the areas product master data management, media asset management, total quality management, data governance and cross media publishing. These are supplemented by a high performance ecommerce platform as well as solutions for electronic data exchange and mobile applications. Applications for translation and language management collaboration and marketing operation management top off the offering.
Overcoming the chaos of complexity seems to be the driving force for these applications. As companies grow, the generate many products, many varieties within their product lines, and a huge spare parts problem for customers and distributors. These complexity management products seek to give management a handle on the problem.