In many Nordic manufacturing companies, ERP systems have been the operational backbone for decades. They manage pricing logic, production planning, procurement, inventory, order handling and financial reporting. ERP is mission critical. It provides stability, accuracy and process control across complex supply chains.
Because of this central role, digital initiatives often begin with a seemingly logical assumption: “We already have all our product data in ERP. Why introduce something else?”
It is a fair question. But it is also where many digital commerce journeys begin to stall.
ERP systems are designed to serve internal operations. Their core strength lies in transactional accuracy and process discipline. They ensure that orders are correct, stock levels are reliable and financials reconcile properly.
Digital commerce serves a different purpose. It must translate product complexity into customer clarity.
A modern B2B buyer expects structured specifications, intuitive variant selection, documentation access, certifications, compatibility insights and real-time availability. They expect to research independently before speaking to sales. They expect the same level of transparency and usability they experience in consumer platforms.
ERP does not model products for customer navigation. It models products for operational control. When ERP master data is pushed directly into a digital channel without enrichment and structural modeling, the result is often technically correct but commercially insufficient. Product pages lack clarity. Filtering underperforms. Documentation is inconsistent. And customers return to manual communication.
Across the Nordics, manufacturers often manage thousands – sometimes tens of thousands – of SKUs. Many operate across multiple European markets, each with its own regulatory requirements, languages and assortment logic.
Product information typically lives across:
This fragmentation becomes invisible internally but painfully visible in digital channels.
When digital commerce initiatives struggle, companies often blame platform choice, UX design or sales resistance. In reality, the limitation is structural. The product data foundation was never built for digital scale.
The most digitally mature manufacturers do not replace ERP. They complement it.
ERP remains responsible for pricing, inventory and transactions. A Product Information Management (PIM) layer becomes responsible for modeling, enriching and publishing product information across channels.
When integrated properly, ERP ensures operational stability while PIM enables:
Combined with commerce and CMS capabilities, this creates a unified digital foundation.
Reframing ERP’s role is not about adding complexity. It is about clarifying responsibilities between systems. It is about recognizing that digital product experience requires a dedicated structure.
For Nordic manufacturers aiming to scale digital sales, customer portals and multi-market commerce, product data clarity becomes a strategic enabler.
ERP remains critical. But it was never designed to be your digital product engine.
If you would like to understand your current product data maturity and identify the next logical step, we invite you to book a short meeting with us to talk through your individual situation. Together, we can evaluate your structure, integration landscape and digital ambitions, and define a scalable path forward.