How is PIESExpress different from PIESCentral?

PIESCentral is designed for suppliers that want a “set-and-forget” PIES generation capability. It extracts product data from data silos spread across an organization and uses user-defined selection and mapping settings to create a PIES file on a scheduled basis.

The data sources are usually static and kept in enterprise databases (mssql, oracle, db2, etc.). It also easily supports multi-language requirements and user-defined extractions (i.e. flat-file exports).

PIESExpress is designed for companies that have data sources that often change and do not require some of the advanced data-manipulation and reporting features included with PIESCentral.

You simply define a set of inputs and mappings and save these instructions to a “document” which can be copied, changed and reused as needed.

This is particularly helpful for ad-hoc PIES generation. A common use case is taking a set of Excel files (or maybe one Excel file with many worksheets) for the different segments of PIES (base-item, part-attributes, interchanges, pricing, etc.) to create a PIES xml file.

It has some data manipulation features, but you can also use Access (linked tables, for example) for more powerful transformations.

Companies might use PIESExpress to convert vendor data so they can make changes to it before incorporating into their PIM (possibly via a new PIES import file).

It does not currently have a flat-file export capability.