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Are you starting to feel like Sisyphus? Instead of pushing a boulder up a hill indefinitely, you're looking for the most recent version of your product data. Every week, forever. The hunt for the most current spreadsheet leads you on a journey through a shared drive, three email threads and a Teams channel, to finally find a file someone has since changed. Every launch starts there, and you lose a day to the search before any real work begins.

Everyone agreed on the launch date. Then, everything fell apart: Marketing had the copy. Sales had the price list. The DAM had images for about half the range. Everything that was supposed to come together on Monday was delayed to Thursday, after a weekend of copying cells by hand. It happens because your product data lives in six places and at least one of them is always behind.

Result = three spreadsheets. Multiply this ⬇ by every launch, every channel and every colleague unsure of which version is the latest, and the real cost of your product data emerges: Hours wasted, errors, and a habit of double-checking everything. The way out: one source, clear ownership, data that reaches the channel without needing a human to copy-paste.

Nobody picks the hard way on purpose. The spreadsheet was set up by someone who left in 2019. It worked for one online store and approx. 800 products. Now, it feeds a marketplace, two dealer portals and a print catalogue. Which means every launch equals keying the same attributes four times, with a different mistake creeping in each time. You could keep doing that. Or...

Marco knows. But... Marco is on holiday. Many companies' product data is organised this way: one person remembers which export is current, which supplier sheet to trust, and why the ERP dimensions are in inches. When Marco is in, launches go out. When he’s away, 3 people hit reply all to ask the same question. It's not Marco's fault though, the problem is structural. The Piste Map guide maps out where product data should live, illustrates how it gets lost between systems, and which of five bottlenecks to fix before the next Marco books a ski holiday.

You probably know a file called Products_master. It has cousins: Products_master_NEW and Products_master_NEW_FINAL. Each was correct when it was saved. Each has also been edited since. The pile grows and grows, one launch at a time, and nobody dares delete anything, because one of those sheets is the only place the EAN codes exist.