Moving a Million SKUs with Pimcore PIM and MDM

Making the impossible possible for efficient inventory management: that's what the Pimcore content management system (CMS) stands for. We show you how not just a few hundred, but millions of SKUs can be migrated and managed with Pimcore — and how codafish supports you along the way.

A Place for Everything

We all know the sayings that motivate people to stay organised — it makes life nicer and keeps things clear, whether at home or in your own bookkeeping. Filing the important documents neatly in labelled folders, ready at hand, is satisfying. What feels like a nice-to-have in everyday life is essential in business. In inventory management, staying organised is non-negotiable — otherwise not just your bookkeeper but your tax office will complain too. Especially in retail, that big word starting with 'O' is the foundation of doing business. How else are you supposed to sell effectively if you have no overview — especially when selling both locally and online? The solution can be abbreviated in three letters: SKU.

Close your eyes and imagine you own a stationery shop in a city centre. Every day you serve customers young and old, supplying them with materials for school, lectures or office work — from hard-lead pencils to notebooks, in every variation and colour. Business is going so well that you keep expanding your stock, move into online sales and open a second store. Amid all the challenges and to-dos, one thing has been essential from your very first sale: structured inventory management. How else would you control your ever-more diverse stock, send reorders, or offer the correct quantity online, if it isn't all recorded in one system? The foundation for your inventory management can be laid easily — or, if you're already firmly established, improved with a project plan. All you need are SKUs, Stock Keeping Units: a unique identifier, like an item or product number, that gives every single product distinguishing features and makes it effortless to track in stock.

One Abbreviation, Many Possibilities

Once you divide your goods into SKUs, all you need is one logic to follow, and you're ready to go. That's the beauty of Stock Keeping Units — you can build your item number around whichever characteristics help you recognise the product at a glance in everyday work: product type, size, style, colour or manufacturer. There are no limits to your system.

Take the pencils in your imaginary stationery shop. What best helps you identify a pencil at a glance from its SKU? Hardness grade, line width, shape, casing, or an extra gimmick like an eraser at the end. The more information you build into your system, the more precisely you can define the Stock Keeping Unit.

Want an example? How does PENCIL-B-HB-002-R sound to you? A bit like a licence plate, sure — but behind these hieroglyphs could be:

• PENCIL – SKU for the product category, i.e. pencil
• B – SKU for the manufacturer, let's call them Pencil Magician
• HB – SKU for the pencil's hardness grade
• 002 – SKU for an additional feature, like the eraser at the end
• R – SKU for the colour red

Fun, isn't it? It almost sounds like a secret language for your company. And that secret language will make your life easier — believe us. But where there's item-number logic, there needs to be a system. And speaking of which — we have an idea for you.

Your Stock Keeping Unit Partner in Crime: Pimcore

As you already know — and as matters especially in inventory management — pen and paper won't get you far. Efficient, economical work needs digital handling. Pimcore set out to answer exactly that question and, with its content management system, built a platform that masters product management with ease. The open-source solution specialises in Product Information Management (PIM) and Master Data Management (MDM) — in short, everything you need for product management. That's why Pimcore is one of the big players in retail and especially in e-commerce, the electronic trade of goods and services over the internet. Study its features and you'll quickly ask yourself: what can't this system do? And that's not meant ironically — its capabilities really shouldn't be underestimated. In Pimcore PIM specifically, we're not talking about the two hundred to five thousand SKUs the system can handle. No — let's talk bigger. In numbers: millions of SKUs for your inventory management.

Above all, you need to know this: Pimcore PIM understands the importance of automation in warehouse management. Imagine having to manually maintain stock across your local stationery shops and your online store — no team on earth could do that accurately, let alone sustainably. Or think of online giants like Amazon or eBay — manually maintaining stock would eat up time, energy and resources for an unacceptable output, given how many purchases happen online worldwide in real time, and how many suppliers and vendors stand behind those products. No — we can all agree: manual stock maintenance is no longer fit for the 21st century, and certainly not efficient. You can safely leave that to Pimcore. Product Information Management (PIM) effortlessly handles millions of product records in a central repository. Using powerful database technologies like indexing and caching, plus flexible data modelling, Pimcore can absorb large volumes of data. The system can also run on powerful hardware or in cloud environments, enabling scalability and bulk data imports. And that alone is just the foundation.

Room for International Management, Too?

Then your wish is our command. As a globally deployable open-source software platform, Pimcore automatically offers various hierarchies in which SKU data is organised for a wide range of countries and languages. How does it work? All data is consolidated under a unique identifier called a GPI (Global Product Identifier). Information is fed in this way and then routed according to countries and their respective languages. Add to that the integration of Product Information Management into international digital trading platforms, and it becomes easy to scale your Stock Keeping Unit across multiple languages, storefronts, countries and marketplaces.

Turning Unimaginable Scale Into Reality

Millions upon millions of SKUs. A fully automated inventory management system with optional connection to multiple marketplaces. And all of it possible internationally, too. Where do you even start? You don't have to answer these questions alone. As a Gold-certified Pimcore agency, we support you especially with complex topics, migrate six-figure SKU volumes together with you, and stand by your side from the very first steps through to going live. We advise you strategically on designing your SKUs, on (re)cataloguing your products, and evaluate Pimcore's many features against your needs and workflows to design a system perfectly tailored to you. Get in touch — in a consultation we'll set the priorities for your digital project together and map out a roadmap.