You know your product information best. While we will not pretend to know your product information, here is the general strategy we recommend for implementing Optimizely PIM.

To view how your PIM implementation fits in with your overall Optimizely B2B Commerce implementation, see the Implementation Timeline.

Recommended Implementation Flow

Review the steps below and complete them in the listed order, as there are dependencies and impacts on subsequent steps. As a best practice, configure your property groups and properties, product templates and categories before loading product data.

Phase	Step	Step Name	Description	Notes
Prepare	1	Design Considerations for Your Data	Start with designing your data. Think about how you want your Product Detail Pages to look on your B2B Commerce website. What information should show for each product? How do you want customers to browse or search for products? What product images or other assets do you want to include?	Saves you time on your implementation Simplifies the initial work
Configuration	2	Understand Roles and Permissions and Add Team Members	Add team members to PIM once you understand the roles and permissions and know how you want to manage your approval and publishing workflow.	Configure Property used for product assignment setting before adding team members
Configuration	3	Configure Property Groups and Properties	Configure property groups?as a visual way to group and organize several properties. Add properties to your groups. Properties?are data elements that define your products, either for internal purposes, like shipping weight, or external purposes, like attributes visible to a customer on your site.	Create Property Groups first Pull Property Groups with Properties into Product Templates
Configuration	4	Create Product Templates	Create product templates that define the data elements that are required or recommended to populate for products within a family of products and enforce data governance.	Need Property Groups and Properties first Templates should match your product families
Configuration	5	Define Category Trees and Categories	Define category trees and categories to organize your products and create taxonomies for customers to browse one or more of your websites.?Your category attributes enable filters on your product list pages in B2B Commerce.	Need Properties mapped to Attributes first This is your website navigation structure
Configuration	6	Configure Settings	Configure settings to customize your experience in PIM.	Configure image sizes before loading assets
Data Load	7	Import Products and Import and Assign Digital Assets	Ensure your products exist in your ERP, so they are orderable by customers. Do a product refresh from your ERP to B2B Commerce of transactional product data like part numbers, titles, tax codes, weights, units of measure, and so on?Then create product records in PIM using imports of data from B2B Commerce, your ERP, suppliers or data feeds.	Need Property Groups and Properties first Product templates and import templates make this process easier Need to know what product data to map to PIM data Need to have your assets organized and ready to import
Maintenance	8	Maintain Product Information	Search for, filter and view products on the Products list page. Edit products within the grid or select an individual product to edit in the product detail view. When your products are 100% complete, you can approve and publish them to your InsiteCommere website.	Need products loaded first Need products assigned to users
Maintenance	9	Organize Digital Assets and Import and Assign Digital Assets	Before uploading assets, create folders for a group of assets so you can upload similar assets together. Organize your asset folders based on product templates, categories, brands, and so on and/or how you assign products to your users. Use tags in addition to categorization as another way to filter for assets. To support auto-assignment of assets to products during import, the product number must be included within the file name.	Organize your assets before you do the initial import Need asset folders before you load assets You then assign assets to products
Maintenance	10	Use Collections and Workspaces to Find Products	Use collections and workspaces to identify information gaps, fix product data issues and locate what products to work on now.	Need products loaded first Need products assigned to users
Maintenance	11	Create Product Variants	Create product variants by selecting the child products and choosing the variant properties for selection by customers on your site.	Need Product Templates first Child product records must exist first
Maintenance	12	Work with the Dashboard and Reports	View notifications, monitor work progress, access workspaces and collections all from the Dashboard.	Need products loaded first Need products assigned to users
Publish	13	Publish Updates to B2B Commerce	Review, approve and publish products to your B2B Commerce site.	What you publish goes live to customers on your site