Every company has a spreadsheet nobody will admit to loving but everyone quietly depends on. It isn’t the official system. Nobody approved it as the source of truth. It just works, so it stays, often because the “real” system managing that information hasn’t caught up to how the business actually operates.
Sylvamo, a global paper company that describes itself as a 150-year-old startup since spinning off from a larger parent to become independent, ran into exactly that problem with its product content. Lisa Salzgeber, Sr. Mgr, Global Commercial Excellence at Sylvamo, walked through it on a recent Syndigo webinar. She shares the three things that matter most when a business decides it’s time for a real product information management foundation.
1. Product knowledge lived with the people, not a shared system
Before Syndigo PIM, Sylvamo’s product content sat with individual brand managers. “A lot of our product content used to sit with the individual brand managers,” Salzgeber says. “And that made sense at the time because they knew the products, they know the products and the business extremely well.”
The problem wasn’t the brand managers’ expertise. It was that their knowledge lived in separate spreadsheets and separate processes. “It was really hard to know what actually existed, what version was current, whether customers were seeing the same information on all of our customer-facing locations, in every single channel,” Salzgeber says.
Sylvamo didn’t want to solve that by sidelining the people who knew the products. “We needed a shared foundation, but we did not want to lose the expertise of the brand teams,” she says. “They still know the products. They know the business. We want to leverage that and continue having them have that knowledge. So that need is what led us to Syndigo PIM.”
The brand managers still contribute the product knowledge. Corporate marketing, corporate affairs, and communications now have the consistency and oversight to manage how that information reaches customers across every channel, and the shared platform gives Sylvamo more confidence in what customers are actually seeing. “We used to get confusion from our customers that, ‘Okay, I see this brand over here on this site, but I think it’s the same, but it looks different on this site over here,'” Salzgeber says. “That’s what Syndigo has provided for us, that consistency across the board.”
2. One product, several names, and a confused customer
A shared foundation matters because of what happens when it’s missing. Salzgeber described a single paper product that could carry “a full name, an abbreviation, a specification attached to the name, a measurement, a term that only perhaps one internal team might use to reference it.”
That’s fine internally. It becomes a real problem the moment it reaches a customer. “If we surface all of that taxonomy, all of that noise to our customers… they might see that on one of our brand marketing sites perhaps, but when they go to our commerce solution, it might be a different description,” she says. “So they’re not necessarily ensuring that it is the correct product that they’re looking at or the same product. That makes searching and comparing the information much more difficult.” It also raises the odds that customers end up looking at an outdated version of the same product.
The fix isn’t asking every internal team to agree on one phrase. It’s connecting the variations so employees don’t need to know another team’s exact language, while customers still see one consistent product. “If the system can recognize those terms as the same product, the information becomes so much easier to find and to use,” Salzgeber says. As she put it, “the paper company has its own language within it once you start talking to folks who have been around for a while, and we don’t want to necessarily expose that to our customers because that’s just going to be confusing.”
3. Standardize where it makes sense, customize where it has to
Rolling out one foundation doesn’t mean forcing every market to look the same. Sylvamo still runs some sites on Syndigo PIM and others on different platforms today, a reflection of how its global business actually developed over time. “We are working towards greater standardization so more teams can use the same product content foundation that we’ve built,” Salzgeber says, including how Sylvamo supports its different regions.
The goal isn’t uniformity for its own sake. “The goal is not to make every market identical, so we do want to recognize the differences in the regional markets that we have around the globe,” she says. “The goal is to simplify the work by sharing the same core information process while accounting for genuine regional requirements. So we look at it as a way of standardize everything where we can and customize where we’re not able to, in recognizing the differences.”
That’s the discipline a shared PIM foundation actually requires: not eliminating every local or channel-specific need, but refusing to let unnecessary variation multiply into the kind of fragmentation Sylvamo started with.
What it adds up to
Sylvamo’s product content didn’t end up fragmented because anyone did anything wrong. It ended up that way because knowledge, channels, and history accumulated faster than any shared system did. The fix wasn’t replacing the brand managers who knew the products. It was building a foundation where that knowledge could reach customers consistently, no matter which channel, region, or system touched it along the way.
If that pre-PIM picture sounds familiar, product information scattered across spreadsheets, descriptions that shift from channel to channel, and no clear way to tell customers in different regions apart, Sylvamo’s path through it is worth hearing in full.
