Win the Race: Master the 50,000+ Aftermarket SKU Challenge

For automotive aftermarket suppliers, speed to market is key. In the current competitive environment, having the in-demand components is just one part of the equation. To capture revenue from retailers, distributors, and repair shops who are now sourcing significant inventory volumes online, your parts must be live on eCommerce marketplaces and distribution channels. And this is where many manufacturers run into a roadblock.

Manufacturers are losing weeks, sometimes months, of potential sales because their product data and digital assets aren’t ready. While your ops team is chasing after fitment data and your eCommerce team is waiting on approved images, your competitor has already launched, taking over the shelves with a first-mover advantage.

Your initial instinct might be to blame your team. But it’s actually your data management that’s holding you back.

Your Data Silo Bottleneck

When we talk with aftermarket manufacturers, most tell a similar story. The fitments data is managed in one or several places, product specs usually live in the ERP, marketing copy is in someone’s inbox, and images are scattered across shared drives and desktops of several people — some of whom might have left a while ago. The result is a painstakingly slow launch process that resembles a relay race where every leg is run by a different team, using different tools, with no shared finish line. This is not efficiency; it’s chaos.

Fitment data alone is a beast to manage. One brake pad SKU might work for hundreds of vehicles that vary by year, make, model, sub-model, engine type, and more. Each application requires its own unique fitment language, which means translating raw engineering data into hundreds of ACES-compliant records that all live in one file. And that’s only half of it.

The product information exchange standard (PIES) governs all the other product-related details, such as pricing, package details, and critical digital asset links. Both standards must be properly populated for any major retailer or trading partner to publish the listing. This leaves a lot of room for error; one wrong attribute could result in returns, chargebacks, and damaged relationships with retailers, costing you more than the sale of this one part. Incomplete PIES data won’t go live at all. Managing this complex process manually or through spreadsheets and ERP exports is exactly how those errors happen.

Why Your Current System is Not Enough

Many companies have some solution in place to manage their product data. Chances are that you’re utilizing your ERP system or a separate generic data management tool to handle it. It’s good to have something in place, but there is a difference between having a system and having the right system.

Although many ERPs can store product attributes, these solutions were not designed to handle publishing workflows, ACES, and PIES compliance validation, or specific formatting requirements from your retail partners. Even if you use ACES data syndication tools, if the data is incomplete or inconsistent, all you’re doing is disseminating bad data more quickly.

What you need is an automotive-specific, not generic, Product Information Management (PIM) solution that provides you with structured, accurate, and ready-to-push product data in the formats required by each channel. These tools automate the critical validation, mapping, and synchronization steps of ACES/PIES compliance while reducing costly downstream errors.

Once you have a well-implemented PIM, you’re halfway there. Although a PIM does an excellent job of packaging product fitment details into beautifully structured and compliant formats, it does nothing to support the digital assets that must travel with the data. So your data might be ready, but those important files that could close the sale are not.

The Missing Half You Can No Longer Ignore

Digital Asset Management (DAM) is probably one of the systems most overlooked by manufacturers. It’s been perceived as a nice-to-have by many who use consumer-grade tools like Dropbox or Google Drive to store their images and manually process metadata and track spreadsheets. But the DAM is more than just a centralized repository for all your images, 3D renders, installation videos, and spec sheets. It’s a searchable library where every asset is properly tagged, linked to correct part numbers, and rendered in whatever format is required without any heavy lifting. And if asset management is something you are already struggling with now, PIES 8.0 will only make things more complicated for you.

The rollout of PIES 8.0 in March of 2026 introduces a new content hash requirement that enables tracking changes and ensures data accuracy. Manufacturers must generate a hash for each asset, enabling downstream systems to detect changes by comparing content fingerprints.

In other words, if you have 100 parts and each has five images associated with it, you must use a tool to generate 500 hashes. But that’s not all.

With the introduction of sequencing, you now have more control over how buyers get to see your parts on the retailer’s pages. This is especially important for complex products, such as ADAS sensor bundles or multi-product kits. This represents a huge opportunity for manufacturers, but the manual heavy lift required to take advantage of this will only slow your launches further.

If you want your eCommerce team to sell your parts, they will need a perfectly formatted 360 degree or 3D images from various angles of the product. Whether it’s technical diagrams, videos, brochures, instructions or other marketing materials, they need to have a consistent backgrounds and correct names, in addition to being in a fully approved, PIES 8.0 compliant format with everything in the right sequence and verified file integrity.

If this information is not readily available, that team wastes days on gathering the right files. Or worse, they may accidentally submit the wrong files. And if their submissions do not meet the retailers' and distributors’ requirements, you may face delays or rejections, extending your launch timeline further. All of these escenarios can be easily avoided with the proper DAM, which automates many of the error-prone, manual steps and enables you to use hashes to send only the product information that has been updated.

The Winning Formula

The manufacturers who are winning the race to market, launching their products in weeks instead of months, all have something in common: their product data and digital assets are managed together in an interconnected system that also integrates with their ERP.

Here’s what this streamlined, more cost-effective way to produce, manage, and distribute product information looks like in practice:

• Whenever a new part is created in the ERP, it immediately becomes recorded in the PIM. Fitment data is added and validated against ACES in real time.
• Product content gets filled out and validated against PIES requirements.
• Images and other supporting assets that are uploaded to the DAM are automatically formatted, named, tagged, and linked to product records.
• When the product is ready to launch, everything gets pushed to each channel at once in the precise format required by each channel.

For the operations team, this means fewer errors and returns as well as stronger trading partnerships. For eCommerce leaders, it means faster listings, richer product content and experiences, and the ability to scale to more channels without increasing headcounts.

As you evaluate PIM and DAM solutions, it’s important to note that although leading software providers on the market today can work with your existing solutions, it’s recommended to choose one provider that offers both PIM and DAM solutions. When both are part of the same system as your ERP, inventory, and supply chain, you eliminate friction as the data flows seamlessly. This frees up your team to focus on the important work that moves the business forward, rather thanon managing the gaps between various applications.

Time to Cut Launch Complexity

Speed to market is becoming THE critical operational metric significantly impacting your revenue in this highly competitive market. But when your fitment data lives in one place, product content in another, with digital assets scattered across various locations, your team spends more time chasing the information and manually adjusting things than actually launching products. This all changes when you choose the right system that lets you connect all your data in one platform, giving you the visibility you need to make decisions in real time.

Suppliers of automotive aftermarket parts don’t land on the digital shelf faster because they hire better people. They launch faster because they chose a PIM and DAM solution that communicates with their ERP. When systems work smoothly, so do the launches.

If launch timelines feel longer than they should, we can help. Contact us today to see how our automotive solutions can get your products to the market faster.