Introduction
What is Middelium?
Middelium is a product management platform and middleware for product owners/managers, specifically for equipment-type products that typically have some service component and warranties attached to them. Since Middelium is API-driven, it acts as a universal adaptor that can connect with both sides of your supply chain system, thus allowing you to manage your product entirely on autopilot. Middelium completely eliminates the need for you to develop individual adaptors for each vendor and marketplace. Middelium thus acts as a universal connector for both sides of the product management equation, connecting seamlessly with your vendors and with your resellers. Middelium is a B2B2B platform since it bridges the gap between product owners and resellers, thus acting as a glue between them.
How Middelium Helps Product Owners
Middelium manages the three most important and critical aspects of product management: a) product pricing, b) product technical specifications and features, and c) product inventory.
This article talks about how Middelium can help you manage these three critical factors of your product in a fully automated way.
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The Three Most Crucial Aspects of Product Management
A. Product Pricing
Most modern products are composed of components and intangibles like warranties and service visits, among others. Middelium lets you compose SKUs and attach a cost to each of these input components. It facilitates this by letting you define costing value for every such input factor, both external as well as internal. As the costs of these input components vary over time, Middelium adjusts your product pricing based on the pricing rules defined by you (Middelium has a flexible and sophisticated pricing rule system in place that helps you decide how your product price should be evaluated, and based on what factors). And since Middelium acts as a middleware, you can connect it to both, your suppliers’ systems as well as marketplaces where your finished products are sold. Or for that matter, even with the POS systems of your resellers who get instant access to your product’s real-time pricing information as it changes.
B. Product Technical Specifications & Features
As your product evolves over time and its capabilities adapt to changing market needs, its technical specifications and features tend to change as well. Updating these changes so that they reflect everywhere, especially at the point of sale, can become challenging. Middelium solves this problem by becoming the single and central source of truth for all your products, keeping track of various specifications like features and benefits, data sheets and other technical information, and so on. As these specifications evolve, the changes are instantly propagated to all the marketplaces and points of sale where your product is listed. (Middelium is API-driven, remember?) And Middelium’s built-in document management system makes it a breeze for you to generate complete product specs, data sheets, and feature/benefit listings at the click of a button. What’s more is that this entire process can be automated so that your product’s documentation instantly reflects any changes within your product’s specifications.
C. Product Inventory
Middelium’s product inventory system is not a simple inward and outgoing logging system; rather, the entire system is premised on the fact that at no time should your inventory reflect incorrectly in any marketplace or retail outlet where your goods are sold. Thus, if one product unit is sold in one outlet, the change should immediately be reflected across every single marketplace, and this is precisely what Middelium does. Since Middelium works in realtime and it sits in the middle of your reseller ecosystem (it is middleware, after all), it dynamically reflects the true status of your stock across all retail platforms, be they online marketplaces or POS systems at retail outlets. Its automatic syncing system ensures that a product unit sold by any reseller propagates correctly so that all other resellers are apprised of the reduction in stock. Now you will never need to refuse an order just because your stock status is not in sync.
Other Aspects
- Taxation
Middelium has been designed to be jurisdiction-aware, and it helps you define taxes based on the specific regulatory environment that you operate in. Taxes may be simple or compounded based on the fiscal requirements of your specific jurisdiction, and Middelium takes care of either scenario. Defining taxes applicable on your product SKUs is part of the product’s configuration management system, and once configured, your product will auto-evaluate all taxes applicable to it. This too becomes part of your product’s pricing history.
- Product History
Middelium maintains historical data of your pricing variations and changes in technical and product specifications, as well as your inventory’s transactional data. This means that you can do away with Excel sheet clutter on your hard drive, since your entire historical product data is available to you at the click of a button, thus giving you a crystal clear picture of how your product has evolved over time.
Conclusion
As a product manager, one of the more crucial tasks for you is managing your product’s pricing and descriptive information, as well as transactional data like inventory. Not just that, but also keeping all stakeholders in loop can be a challenging and daunting task. Middelium is a groundbreaking product middleware platform designed to streamline, simplify, and automate these processes. By acting as a universal adaptor, Middelium seamlessly integrates with supplier ERP systems on the one side, and various marketplaces and POS systems on the other, thereby providing a cohesive solution for product managers.
Further Reading
We strongly recommend that you check out the entire list of features on the main Middelium website.
